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IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


AN ILLUSTRATED COURSE 
FOR STUDENTS 


ADELE BILDERSEE, A.M. 

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH 
HUNTER COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK 



D. C. HEATH AND COMPANY 

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO LONDON 
ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO DALLAS 


2 . 




Copyright, 1927, 

By D. C. Heath and Company 

2 a 7 


PRINTED IN U.S.A. 

FEB-2'27 

©Cl A967025 
Vl-0 V'' 




TO 

HELEN GRAY CONE 

Long I followed happy guides 




























ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


The writer wishes to acknowledge gratefully her indebtedness to 
Blanche Colton Williams, who has been kind enough to read part of 
the manuscript and whose encouragement and interest have been 
invaluable. 

For permission to use passages quoted in this volume the writer 
would make grateful acknowledgment to the following publishers: 

Houghton Mifflin Company for selections from Self-Cultivation in 
English by George Herbert Palmer; John Keats , Men, Women and 
Ghosts , and Pictures of the Floating World by Amy Lowell; By the 
Christmas Fire by Samuel McChord Crothers; Christopher and David 
Penstephen by Richard Pryce; The Prose of Edward Rowland Sill; 
Some Imagist Poets; America at Work by Joseph Husband; Tante by 
Anne Douglas Sedgwick; Words and Idioms by Logan Pearsall Smith; 
Stories to Tell to Children by Sara Cone Bryant. 

Dodd, Mead, and Company for selections from Talks to Writers 
by Lafcadio Hearn, edited by John Erskine; The Handling of Words 
by Vernon Lee; The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. 

Charles Scribner’s Sons for selections from The Genius of Style 
by W. C. Brownell; Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Steven¬ 
son; The Diary of a Dude-Wrangler by Struthers Burt; Father 
Bernard’s Parish by Florence Olmstead; The Craft of Fiction by 
Percy Lubbock; The Silver Box by John Galsworthy. 

Little, Brown, and Company for selections from Essays and Essay- 
Writing by William M. Tanner. 

Longmans, Green and Company for selections from Literary Studies 
by Walter Bagehot. 

Mitchell Kennerley for selections from The Door in the Wall and 
Other Stories by H. G. Wells; The Cry of Youth by Harry Kemp. 

Harper and Brothers for selections from Peter Ibbetson by George 


vi 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


Du Maurier; The Perennial Bachelor by Anne Parrish; Gaslight So¬ 
natas by Fannie Hurst; Outlines in Local Color by Brander Matthews. 

Allyn and Bacon for selections from The Principles of Success in 
Literature by George Henry Lewes. 

Henry Holt and Company for selections from The New Era in 
American Literature by Louis Untermeyer; North of Boston by Robert 
Frost; The Listeners and other Poems by Walter De La Mare. 

John Murray for selections from Songs of the Road by Sir Arthur 
Conan Doyle. 

Doubleday, Page, and Company for selections from The Wayfarers 
by Mary Stewart Cutting; Tobogganing on Parnassus by Franklin P. 
Adams. 

Duffield and Company for selections from Set to Partners by 
Mrs. Henry Dudeney. 

Harcourt, Brace, and Company for selections from Main Street by 
Sinclair Lewis; Ten Hours by Constance I. Smith. 

Oxford University Press for selections from The Problem of Style 
by J. Middleton Murry. 

The Viking Press for selections from A Story Teller's Story by 
Sherwood Anderson. 

G. Bell and Sons for selections from In a Green Shade by Maurice 
Henry Hewlett. 

Boni and Liveright for selections from In Our Time by Ernest 
Hemingway. 

G. P. Putnam’s Sons for selections from The Happy Prince and 
other Fairy Tales by Oscar Wilde. 

James B. Pinker and Sons for selections from The Nigger of the 
Narcissus by Joseph Conrad. 

The George H. Doran Company, publishers, for selections from 
The Judge by Rebecca West, copyright 1922; Some Things that 
Matter by Lord Riddell, 1922; Victorian Poetry by John Drinkwater, 
1924; The Green Mirror by Hugh Walpole, 1919; Jeremy by Hugh 
Walpole, 1919. 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii 

From G. K. Chesterton’s Robert Browning, Copyright 1903 by the 
Macmillan Company. Reprinted by Permission. 

From Sara Teasdale’s Rivers to the Sea, Copyright 1915 by the 
Macmillan Company. Reprinted by Permission. 

From John Masefield’s Salt-Water Ballads, Copyright 1902 by the 
Macmillan Company. Reprinted by Permission. 

From Mary S. Watts’s The Rise of Jennie Cushing, Copyright 1914 
by the Macmillan Company. Reprinted by Permission. 

By Permission from A Hind in Richmond Park by W. H. Hudson, 
Copyright by E. P. Dutton and Company. 

From The Literary Discipline, John Erskine. Used by special 
permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 

Reprinted from One of Ours by Willa Cather by permission of 
and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorized 
publishers. 

Reprinted from Fanny’s First Play by Bernard Shaw by courtesy 
of Brentano’s, the publishers. 

The author is indebted to the following authors and publishers 
for permission to reprint: The Boston Evening Transcript for “Miss 
Liza” by Virginia Taylor McCormick; the New York Times for 
selections from a review of Edward Martin Taber’s Stowe Notes; the 
American Magazine and Irvin S. Cobb for selections from “How to 
Begin at the Top and Work Down”; Scribner’s Magazine for selec¬ 
tions from “Acquiring a Sense of the Picturesque ”; The Midland for 
selections from “Where’s Minnie” by Alma Burnham Hovey; The 
Dial for selections from “An Autobiographic Chapter” by Randolph 
Bourne; Winifred Sanford for selections from “The Blue Spruce,” 
reprinted from the American Mercury; Sara Haardt for selections 
from “Commencement,” reprinted from the American Mercury; The 
Reviewer and Sandra Alexander for selections from “The Gift”; 
Charles Caldwell Dobie and Harper’s Magazine for selections from 
,u The Hands of the Enemy”; Frederick L. Allen and Harper’s Maga¬ 
zine for selections from “The Goon and His Style”; Zona Gale and 
Harper’s Magazine for selections from “White Bread”; Katharine 


Vlll 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


Fullerton Gerould and Harper's Magazine for selections from “An 
Army with Banners”; Collier's for selections from “Fire and Water” 
by Glenway Wescott; Pictorial Review and May Stanley for selections 
from “Old Man Ledge”; the Atlantic Monthly Company for selec¬ 
tions from “Coward’s Castle” by Walter Gilkyson, reprinted from 
the Atlantic Monthly by special permission of the Atlantic Monthly 
Company; the Atlantic Monthly Company for selections from 
“Dawn,” by Helen Dore Boylston, reprinted from the Atlantic 
Monthly by special permission of the Atlantic Monthly Company. 

The writer gratefully acknowledges her indebtedness to the fol¬ 
lowing authors: Howard Brubaker for permission to reprint “Ranny 
Discovers America”; Booth Tarkington for selections from Seventeen; 
Lady Russell for selections from The Pastor's Wife; Kathleen Norris 
for selections from Saturday's Child; Ethel M. Feuerlicht for permis¬ 
sion to reprint “The Princess.” 

Thanks are extended to the Hunter College Echo and to the student 
writers whose work appears in these pages. 


PREFACE 


The aim of this book is to guide students in learning how to write. 
During twenty years, more or less, of experience, the teacher who 
writes the book has learned at least this: that the art of writing 
cannot be taught; it can only be learned. The part the teacher can 
play in this process is that of guide and adviser — collaborator, if 
need be. Accordingly the book has its center, not in the subject 
matter to be taught, but in the students to be reached. Its plan may 
sometimes seem not logical because it frankly aspires to be peda¬ 
gogical. It presents not the results of investigations that have been 
conducted by the teacher, but problems to be solved by the students 
together with the teacher. It attempts a statement, not of all the 
information that can be gathered concerning description and narra¬ 
tion, but of such material as is immediately helpful to the student 
in encouraging in him an interest in writing as a means of expressing 
what he has to communicate, in arousing in him a determination to 
write as well as he can, and in leading him in his efforts to master the 
technical difficulties of writing. 

To achieve this purpose, teacher and students consult practiced 
craftsmen of the art. They do not ask these masters to discourse 
upon their methods; they study the finished handiwork as young 
painters study the canvases of their masters. They do this in a 
spirit of inquiry too humble to draw upon themselves the rebuke: 
“You would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart 
of my mystery; you would sound me*from my lowest note to the top 
of my compass.” They know that there is about the art of writing 
only a minimum that they can thus learn. That minimum it is their 
aim to learn; and the aim of a book like this is to help them to learn 
it by arranging the steps of their approach to the mystery, by assist- 


IX 


X 


PREFACE 


ing them in their endeavor to gain from their acquaintance with the 
work of the masters all that is in it for them, and by leading them to 
apply to their own experience in their own way the methods they 
have seen the masters apply to their experience in their way. 

ADELE BILDERSEE 

New York, 

January 15, 1927. 


CONTENTS 


I. The Way to Learn to Write . i 

Writing an art attainable by all. Writing an art difficult 
for all. Description as a field of writing. 

II. The Materials of Description. 9 


The “sight and sound and smell and handling of things.” 
The love of things in the poet and the child. Cultivating 
the observation of things. Developing all the senses. 


Students' report: the use of the senses in current litera¬ 
ture. 

III. The Subjects of Description. 21 

Personal, direct impressions of life. The beauty of the 
commonplace. Students' exercise: a test of observation. 

IV. The Method of Description. 26 

Unity of tone. Harmony of material. Effect on the ob¬ 
server. Continuity of interest. The dramatic method. 

V. Writing the First Chapter. 40 


Description in the opening chapters of the autobiographi¬ 
cal novel. The third person method. Preparation of 
manuscript. Habits of work. Students' exercise: han¬ 
dling the descriptive material. Students' writing: auto¬ 
biographical novel; Chapter I, A Neighborhood. 

VI. Sincerity and Simplicity in Writing ... 46 

The “goonish style.” The language of common speech. 
Pretentious words. Stale words. Students' report. 
sincerity and simplicity of diction in current writing. 

VII. Concrete and Compact Writing. 5 6 

The second chapter: shops. Creative language. Con- 
xi 








CONTENTS 


xii 

creteness. Compactness. Students’ report: concrete, spe¬ 
cific diction in descriptive writing. Students’ writing: 
Chapter II, A Market. 

VIII. Building the Sentence. 64 

Difficulty of constructing the descriptive sentence. Help¬ 
fulness of the dramatic method. Parallel structure. 
Variety. Movement. Students’ report: the sentence in 


description. Students’ writing: Chapter III, A Room. 

IX. Putting Action into Words. 74 

Words of action. Students’ writing: Chapter IV, People 
at Work. 

X. A Feeling for Word Values. 80 


Sound-value of words. Atmospheric qualities of words. 
Figurative words. Danger of far-fetched figures. Dan¬ 
ger of trite figures. Students’ report: lists of figures of 
speech. Students’ writing: Chapter V, A Landscape. 

XI. Describing People. 90 

Familiarity with subject of description. Description 
through action. Comment outside the story. Comment 
within the story. Materials of description. “Typical” 
descriptions. Students’ writing: Chapter VI, People. 

XII. The Novel in which Nothing Happens: 

Narration without Plot. 100 

The step from description to narration. The everyday 
round. Points of structure and style. Students’ writing: 
Chapter VII, The Everyday Round. 

XIII. Collisions: Narration with Plot. 111 

Source of plot. Struggle between one person and another. 
Struggle between a person and impersonal forces. 
Struggle within a person. Choice of short story ma¬ 
terial. Limitation in time. Preliminary statement of 
struggle. Students’ writing: preliminary statement of 
struggle in original short story. 








CONTENTS 


xiii 

XIV. Pattern: The Dramatic Type of Plot . . 118 

The triangle of dramatic structure. Structural points. 
Analyzing the short story. Students’ exercise: analyses 
of selected short stories. Students’ writing: structural 
plan of original short story. 

XV. Presentation: The Dramatic Method . . . 139 

Dramatic presentation. The transition. The scene-plan. 

The running scene. Scene-plan of a selected story. The 
value of this analysis. Writing the scene plan. Stu¬ 
dents’ exercise: scene-plan of selected short story. Stu¬ 
dents’ writing: scene-plan of original short story. 

XVI. The Scene. 153 

Scene structure. Scene development through conversa- 
sation. Plot and character through conversation. 
English of conversation. Dialect. Speech individual¬ 
ized. Concomitants of Speech. Technique of conversa¬ 
tion. Description in the scene. Students’ exercise: 
scene written in play form. Students’ writing: the scene 
in short story form. 

XVII. Special Parts of the Story. 170 

The beginning: opening scene, other openings. As the 
story goes on: the angle of vision, movement, accident 
and coincidence. Ending. Title. Students’ report: 
methods of beginning the short story. Students’ writing: 
original short story (opening through first scene). An 
original short story (continued or concluded). 

XVIII. A Vacation from Realism. *79 

Historical romance. Tales of the"occult. Fairy and folk 
tales. Source of material. Sense of the familiar. Sense 
of the marvelous. Poetic justice. Symmetry of struc¬ 
ture. Parallelism. Repetition. Concreteness. Stu¬ 
dents’ report: materials and methods of fairy tales. Stu¬ 
dents’ writing: summary of original fairy tale plot. 
Opening scene of fairy tale. A fairy tale. 





XIV 


CONTENTS 


XIX. The One-Act Play. 

The short story and the one-act play. Originating in 
struggle. Limited by what we know of life. Limited 
by the possibilities of the playhouse. Limited to one 
setting and one time. Source of play ideas. The gene¬ 
sis of a play. Constructing the stage setting. Building 
the plot. Writing the scenario. The dialogue in the 
play. Stage business. Opening the play. As the play 
goes on. Putting the play on paper. Rehearsing and 
rewriting. Reading and seeing plays. Plays of fairy 
and folk lore. Their structure. Their source. Students' 
writing: Statement of original one-act play. Scenario 
of play. Opening of play. A play. 

XX. In Conclusion. 




IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


CHAPTER I 

THE WAY TO LEARN TO WRITE 

What is in the mind of the college student as he faces his 
instructor in a class in English composition? What especially 
is his attitude toward his task of writing? The teacher’s desk 
is usually a barrier past which few candid expressions travel 
from students to faculty. Yet if the teacher has ears to hear he 
will have caught murmurs. An occasional student may have 
confided in him over a paper profusely marked with red or blue. 

An attainable art. — These confidences often take the form 
of a despairing “I never could write. There’s no use in my try¬ 
ing.” Are there really people who never can write? Is it true 
for any one that there is no use in trying? Here is the testimony 
of George Herbert Palmer. 1 What Professor Palmer said in 
encouragement to an audience of workingmen with little leisure 
for writing must be doubly reassuring to a class of college stu¬ 
dents: 

No human employment is more free and calculable than the 
winning of language. Undoubtedly there are natural aptitudes for it, 
as there are for farming, seamanship, or being a good husband. But 
nowhere is straight work more effective. Persistence, care, dis¬ 
criminating observation, ingenuity, refusal to lose heart, traits 
which in every other occupation tend toward excellence, — tend 
toward it here with special security. 

1 Self-Cultivation in English , George Herbert Palmer. Houghton Mifflin. 


2 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


A difficult art. — Almost always, too, the student who begins 
by saying, “I never could write,’ 7 will continue, “Look at 
so-and-so. I’m sure that he dashes off his papers the morning 
they’re due, and he gets an A every time. And I work for hours 
on mine — and see the result! ” Again listen to Professor Palmer: 

But the very fact that literary endowment is immediately rec¬ 
ognized and eagerly envied has induced a strange illusion in regard to 
it. It is supposed to be something mysterious, innate in him who 
possesses it, and quite out of the reach of him who has it not. The 
very contrary is the fact. 

Lafcadio Hearn, 1 talking to students in Japan, warned them 
against the “foolish belief that great work, or even worthy work, 
can be done without pains — without very great pains. . . . 
Above all things,” he insisted, “do not imagine that any good 
work can be done without immense pains.” 

No man can produce real literature at one writing. I know that 
there are a great many stories about famous men sitting down to 
write a wonderful book at one effort, and never even correcting the 
manuscript afterwards. But I must tell you that the consensus of 
literary experience declares nearly all these stories to be palpable 
lies. To produce even a single sentence of good literature requires 
that the text be written at least three times. But for one who is 
beginning, three times three were not too much. . . . And you will 
find that to reproduce the real thought faithfully in words will require 
a great deal of time. I am quite sure that few of you will try to do 
work in this way in the beginning; you will try every other way 
first, and have many disappointments. Only painful experience can 
assure you of the necessity of doing this. For literature more than 
for any other art, the all-necessary thing is patience. 

In an amusing article in the American Magazine Irvin S. 
Oobb 2 tells how he “dashes off” his stories: 

1 Talks to Writers, Lafcadio Hearn, edited by lohn Erskine. Dodd, 
Mead. 

2 “How to Begin at the Top and Work Down,” Irvin S. Cobb. American 
Magazine, August, 1925. 


THE WAY TO LEARN TO WRITE 


3 


You should see me some morning when I’m in the mood for dashing 
off the stuff. There I sit, dashing it off at the rate of about an inch 
and a half an hour, and using drops of sweat for punctuations. I’m 
the same sort of impetuous dasher that the Muir Glacier is. And so 
is every other writer I know who is getting by with it. They say 
Thackeray worked three weeks once over a single paragraph, and 
then threw it away and started in all over again. What ails the rest 
of us is that we work long hours over those paragraphs, and then 
haven’t sense enough to throw them away. We leave them in. . . . 

... I learned the rudiments of my trade by main strength and 
awkwardness. Also by serving a twenty-year apprenticeship of 
training in newspaper shops. Also by continually polishing my work 
and swearing at it and perspiring over it, and frequently almost 
expiring over it, in an effort to make the present bit of handicraft 
better stuff than the one before it was. 

If the power to write should ever be “something mysterious, 
innate in him who possesses it,” it should surely be so with the 
poet. But Miss Amy Lowell, herself no inconsiderable practi¬ 
tioner, has said that “the poet must learn his trade in the same 
manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the cabinet¬ 
maker.” In her life of Keats 1 she reminds us: 

Keats corrected and corrected. All good poets correct. . . . 
His early drafts are full of alterations done in the very heat of com¬ 
position. . . . 

. . . The first draft of the Eve of St. Agnes , in my collection, is so 
altered and rewritten as to be almost unreadable. . . . 

And why should this not be true of writing? Is it not true of 
every other art? Is it not true of every form of skill in whatever 
field it is displayed? 

Paderewsky himself is chained to the keyboard. The Morphys 
of chess keep in form and study new problems, I believe. And the 
Hoppes of b illi ards and Ty Cobbs of baseball were not altogether 
born so. 2 

1 John Keats , Amy Lowell. Houghton Mifflin. 

2 The Genius of Style , W. C. Brownell. Scribner. 


4 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


Perhaps the most eloquent and convincing words that can 
be quoted to dispel forever this “strange illusion” that writing 
is easy for the elect and impossible for all else are to be found 
in the opening pages of Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay, “A 
College Magazine.” 1 Although we may not care to follow in 
detail the method suggested by Stevenson, his remarks are so 
helpful in determining our attitude toward writing that I am 
giving them almost in full: 

All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out 
for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own 
private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in 
my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was 
busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the 
roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-book 
would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or com¬ 
memorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And 
what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written consciously 
for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author 
(though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I would learn 
to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practised 
to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself. De¬ 
scription was the principal field of my exercise; for to any one with 
senses there is always something worth describing, and town and 
country are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways 
also; often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which 
I played many parts; and often exercised myself in writing down 
conversations from memory. 

This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes 
tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a 
school of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was 
not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it 
only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the lower and 
less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note 
and the right word. . . . And regarded as training, it had one 
grave defect; for it set me no standard of achievement. So there was 
perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret 

1 Memories and Portraits , Robert Louis Stevenson. Scribner. 


THE WAY TO LEARN TO WRITE 


5 


labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particu¬ 
larly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with 
propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some 
happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself 
to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried 
again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at 
least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, 
in construction, and in the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played 
the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas 
Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and 
to Obermann. I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was 
called The Vanity of Morals: it was to have had a second part, The 
Vanity of Knowledge; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, 
the names were apt; but the second part was never attempted, and 
the first part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghost¬ 
like, from its ashes) no less than three times: first in the manner of 
Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a pass¬ 
ing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. 

. . . Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the 
inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of the Book of 
Snobs. So I might go on for ever, through all my abortive novels, 
and down to my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they 
were not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old 
Dumas, but have met with resurrections: one, strangely bettered 
by another hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily 
actors; the other, originally known as Semiramis: a Tragedy , I have 
observed on bookstalls under the alias of Prince Otto. But enough 
has been said to show by what arts of impersonation, and in what 
purely ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on paper. 

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have 
profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there 
was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats’s; it was so, 
if we could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why 
a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back 
to earlier and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out: But 
this is not the way to be original! It is not; nor is there any way but 
to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in 
this training that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can 
be none more original than Montaigne, neither could any be more 


6 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


unlike Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one 
must have tried in his time to imitate the other. . . . Nor is there 
anything here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can 
tell what cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried 
all that are possible; before he can choose and preserve a fitting key 
of words, he should long have practised the literary scales; and it is 
only after years of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, 
legions of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase 
simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what 
he wants to do and (within the narrow limits of a man’s ability) able 
to do it. 

“That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write.” There is 
no one who can write without the “straight work,” the “per¬ 
sistence, care, discriminating observation, ingenuity, refusal to 
lose heart” of Professor Palmer; none who can write without 
having practiced the “literary scales” of Stevenson. 

Description as a field of writing. — “Description was the 
principal field of my exercise,” says Stevenson; “for to any one 
with senses there is always something worth describing, and 
town and country are but one continuous subject.” But, you 
may ask, is description worth such painstaking endeavor as we 
are called upon to give? Is it not a rather unimportant kind of 
writing, a sort of handmaid serving other forms of writing in 
essay or story? Does it satisfy any real need of our mind? We 
can appreciate the necessity for the rigorous training in logical 
reasoning and clear, cogent expression that we get through a 
course in expository writing. But why description? 

The answer may well come to us again from those who have 
the authority to speak. Carlyle writes in “The Hero as Poet”: 

For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of 
a man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is 
physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint 
you a likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his 
manner of doing it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, 
he could not have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type 


THE WAY TO LEARN TO WRITE 


7 


of it, unless he had, what we may call, sympathised with it — had 
sympathy in him to bestow on objects. He must have been sincere 
about it too; sincere and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot 
give you the likeness of any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, 
fallacy and trivial hearsay, about all objects. 

Training, then, in giving the “likeness of any object” may save 
us from being “men without worth,” dwelling in “vague out¬ 
wardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay, about all objects.” 

Browning has a word to add to Carlyle’s. He is speaking 
literally, in his poem “Fra Lippo Lippi,” of the painter with 
pallette and brush, but what he says is equally true of the 
painter with words: 

. . . You’ve seen the world 
— The beauty and the wonder and the power, 

The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades, 

Changes, surprises, — and God made it all! 

— For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no, 

For this fair town’s face, yonder river’s line, 

The mountain round it and the sky above, 

Much more the figures of man, woman, child, 

These are the frame to? What’s it all about? 

To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon, 

Wondered at? oh, this last of course! — you say. 

But why not do as well as say, — paint these 
Just as they are, careless what comes of it? 

God’s works — paint any one, and count it crime 
To let a truth slip. Don’t object, “His works 
Are here already; nature is complete: 

Suppose you reproduce her — (which you can’t) 

There’s no advantage! you must beat her, then.” 

For, don’t you mark? we’re made so that we love 
First when we see them painted, things we have passed 
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; 

And so they are better, painted —• better to us, 

Which is the same thing. Art was given for that; 

God uses us to help each other so, 

Lending our minds out. 


8 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


And Shelley, in A Defence of Poetry , says in prose of poetry 
what Browning has just said in verse of painting. We may apply 
this too, as we did the other, to prose description: 

It purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which 
obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel 
that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It 
creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds 
by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. 

Browning’s painter thinks of the work of his hands as helping 
others to see. To others he lends his mind. But this mind that 
truly sees the world gains pleasure also for itself from the seeing. 
Miss Rebecca West shows us the young girl of her novel, The 
Judge / looking out upon the Edinburgh street. She tells us: 

She had this rich consciousness of her surroundings. ... It 
kept her happy even now, when from time to time she had to lick 
up a tear with the point of her tongue, on the thin joy of the twilight. 

Really the world was very beautiful. 

Indeed, Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton 1 2 points out that it was 
principally Browning’s “rich consciousness” of his surround¬ 
ings that brought the poet his great joy in life: 

Browning’s optimism is of that ultimate and unshakeable order 
that is founded upon the absolute sight, and sound, and smell, and 
handling of things. If a man had gone up to Browning and asked 
him with all the solemnity of the eccentric, “Do you think life is 
worth living? ” it is interesting to conjecture what his answer might 
have been. ... If he . . . had simply answered the question 
. . . with the real, vital answer that awaited it in his own soul, he 
would have said as likely as not, “ Crimson toadstools in Hampshire.” 
Some plain, glowing picture of this sort left on his mind would be his 
real verdict on what the universe had meant to him. 

1 The Judge, Rebecca West. Doran. 

2 Robert Browning , G. K. Chesterton. Macmillan. 


CHAPTER II 

THE MATERIALS OF DESCRIPTION 


Sight and sound and smell and handling of things. — This 
“absolute sight, and sound, and smell, and handling of things,” 
which Mr. Chesterton considers the root of optimism, is the 
material of descriptive writing. When we want to make our 
words recreate for others the experiences that have reached us 
through eye, and ear, and nose, and palate, and finger tips, we 
write description. When we read words of others “about the 
shining, colored, sounding, hot, cold, bitter, sweet things which 
must have touched and smitten their senses ,” 1 we read descrip¬ 
tion. Description finds its subjects in things — such things as 
Rupert Brooke 2 loved: 

These I have loved: 

White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, 
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; 

Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust 
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food; 

Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood; 


The benison of hot water; furs to touch; 

The good smell of old clothes; and other such — 

The comfortable smell of friendly fingers, 

Hair’s fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers 
About dead leaves and last year’s ferns. . . . 

Dear names, 

And thousand other throng to me! Royal flames; 

Sweet water’s dimpling laugh from tap or spring; 

1 The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology , Vernon 
Lee. Dodd, Mead. 

2 Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Dodd, Mead. 

9 



IO 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing; 

Voices in laughter, too; and body’s pain, 

Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train; 

Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam 
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home; 

And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold 
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould; 

Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew; 

And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new; 

And new-peeled sticks; and shiny pools on grass; — 

All these have been my loves. 

The child’s love of things. — This love of things is the gift of 
all of us when we are children. 

When I was a little boy [writes the author of a paper on “The 
Flavor of Things” in the Contributors Club of the Atlantic Monthly 
I used to get a great deal of satisfaction out of stroking a kitten or a 
puppy, or crushing a lilac leaf-bud for its spring fragrance, or smelling 
newly turned soil, or tasting the sharp acid of a grape tendril, or 
feeling the green coolness of the skin of a frog. I could pore for long 
minutes over a lump of pudding-stone, a bean-seedling, a chrysalis, 
a knot in a joist in the attic. There was a curious contentment to 
be found in these things. My pockets were always full of shells and 
stones, twigs and bugs; my room in the attic, of Indian relics, frag¬ 
ments of ore, birds’ eggs, oak-galls, dry seeds and seaweeds, bottled 
spiders, butterflies on corks. All the lessons of the schoolroom seemed 
of no consequence compared with Things so full of intimacy, of 
friendliness. 

All children love things in this way, because of their appeal to the 
senses; and I suppose that all older people do, too, though they may 
not know it. 

Dr. Samuel McChord Crothers’s “The Ignominy of Being 
Grown-Up” 1 2 records another small boy’s delight in things: 

For four years my Philosopher has been interrogating Nature, 
and he has not yet begun to exhaust the subject. Though he has 

1 Essays and Essay-Writing , William M. Tanner. Little, Brown. 

2 By the Christmas Fire , Samuel McChord Crothers. Houghton Mifflin. 


MATERIALS OF DESCRIPTION 


II 


accumulated a good deal of experience, he is still in his intellectual 
prime. He has not yet reached the “school age,” which in most 
persons marks the beginning of the senile decay of the poetic imagina¬ 
tion. 

In my walks and talks with my Philosopher I have often been 
amazed at my own limitations. ... In comparing notes with 
my Philosopher I am chagrined at my own color-blindness. He 
recognizes so many superlative excellences to which I am stupidly 
oblivious. 

In one of our walks we stop at the grocer’s, I having been asked to 
fill the office of domestic purveyor. It is a case where the office has 
sought the man, and not the man the office. Lest we forget, every¬ 
thing has been written down so that a wayfaring man, though a fool, 
need not err therein, — baking-powder and coffee and a dozen eggs, 
and last and least, and under no circumstances to be forgotten, a 
cake of condensed yeast. These things weigh upon my spirits. The 
thought of that little yeast-cake shuts out any disinterested view of the 
store. It is nothing to me but a prosaic collection of the necessaries 
of life. I am uncheered by any sense of romantic adventure. 

Not so with my Philosopher. He is in the rosy dawn of expecta¬ 
tion. The doors are opened, and he enters into an enchanted country. 
His eyes grow large as he looks about him. He sees visions of the 
Good, the True, and the Beautiful in all their bewildering, concrete 
variety. They are in barrels and boxes and paper bundles. They 
rise toward the sky in shelves that reach at last the height of the 
gloriously unattainable. He walks through the vales of Arcady, 
among pickles and cheeses. ' He lifts up his eyes wonderingly to 
snowy Olympus crowned with Pillsbury’s Best. He discovers a 
magic fountain, not spurting up as if it were but for a moment, but 
issuing forth with the mysterious slowness that befits the liquefac¬ 
tions of the earlier world. “ What is that? ” he asks, and I can hardly 
frame the prosaic word “Molasses.” “Molasses!” he cries, gurgling 
with content; “what a pretty word!” I hadn’t thought about it, 
but it is a pretty word, and it has come straight down from the 
Greek word for honey. . . . 

Cultivating the observation of things. — Some of us, usually 
poets, like Rupert Brooke, keep these keen senses unspoiled 
and undimmed as we grow older. Amy Lowell in her life of 


12 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


Keats quotes from William Sharp’s Life and Letters of Joseph 
Severn: 

Severn was astonished by his companion’s faculty of observation. 
Nothing seemed to escape him, the song of a bird and the undernote 
of response from covert or hedge, the rustle of some animal, the 
changing of the green and brown lights and furtive shadows, the 
motions of the wind — just how it took certain tall flowers and plants 
— and the wayfaring of the clouds: even the features and gestures of 
passing tramps. . . . 

Miss West, in a phrase which I omitted when I quoted from 
The Judge , calls this alertness a “ fortuitous possession, a mere 
congenital peculiarity.” But if for us it is not a “congenital 
peculiarity,” we need not despair; just as the ability to write 
may be cultivated, so this may be cultivated. And as without 
it, congenital or acquired, it is impossible to write one sentence 
of description, it must be encouraged and developed by students 
who are beginning a course in descriptive writing. Lord Riddell, 
in his interesting book Some Things That Matter , l suggests 
a method: 

Attention is a habit of mind. You can force yourself to pay atten¬ 
tion and observe, but if you wish to become an effective, consistent 
observer you must cultivate the observing habit of mind. . . . 

Houdin, the great French conjurer, trained himself to observe by 
special exercises. He would walk past a shop window and, without 
stopping, notice and memorize as many of the objects displayed in it 
as he could; then he wrote down a list of them. At first his lists were 
short, and his walking pace had to be slow. But by assiduous prac¬ 
tice he was able in one quick glance to notice and afterwards record 
an incredible number of things, and the faculty of swift observation 
thus acquired was half the secret of his success as a magician. 

. . . Can you accurately write down the colour of the eyes of any 
dozen people you know? You will find it a difficult task. A written 
record is a wonderful test of observation. If you want to observe 

1 Some Things That Matter , George Allardice Riddell. Doran. 


MATERIALS OF DESCRIPTION 13 

accurately, write down what you see. . . . The pen is a wonderful 
aid to the eye. . . . 

Hearing is as important to observation as sight. Some people 
have more acute hearing than others. But hearing can be developed 
in the same way as observation through the eye. 

Charles Dickens had this power of observation — had it, 
Walter Bagehot 1 remarks, in an “ inordinate measure.” He 
writes: 

We have heard, — we do not know whether correctly or incor¬ 
rectly, — that he can go down a crowded street, and tell you all that 
is in it, what each shop was, what the grocer’s name was, how many 
scraps of orange-peel there were on the pavement. His works give 
you exactly the same idea. The amount of detail which there is in 
them is something amazing, — to an ordinary writer something 
incredible. There are single pages containing telling minutice, which 
other people would have thought enough for a volume. ... He 
has . . . the peculiar alertness of observation that is observable 
in those who live by it. He describes London like a special cor¬ 
respondent for posterity. 

Developing all the senses: Hearing. — When we use the 

word observation , the sense that we have in mind is almost always 
sight; and too often descriptive writing appeals chiefly to the 
eye and ignores the other senses. Frequently we hear descrip¬ 
tive writing spoken of as “word painting”; and although the 
analogy is helpful in so far as it emphasizes the concrete subject 
matter of description, it is harmful if it limits us to form, size, 
texture, light and shade, color — to all that the artist can 
represent with paint on canvas — and makes us neglect the 
additional wealth of experience that the writer can suggest with 
words. The sense of hearing alone, for example, may furnish 
sufficient material for description, as it does in Mr. H. G. Wells’s 
passage: 

1 Literary Studies , Walter Bagehot. Longmans, Green. 


14 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


It was a steady stream of din, from which the ear picked out first 
one thread and then another; there was the intermittent snorting, 
panting, and seething of the steam engines, the suck and thud of 
their pistons, the dull beat on the air as the spokes of the great 
driving wheels came round, a note the leather straps made as they 
ran tighter and looser, and a fretful tumult from the dynamos; and, 
over all, sometimes inaudible as the ear tired of it, and then creeping 
back upon the senses again, was this trombone note of the great 
machine . 1 

Lord Riddell, you will remember, makes the point that hearing 
is as important to observation as sight. 

Developing all the senses: Smell. — Lord Riddell might 
have insisted also on smell as a sense valuable to life and to 
literature. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in an address before the 
Royal Geographical Society, was reported by the New York 
Times 2 as having spoken of travel pictures conjured up by some 
chance smell. He had noticed that whenever a few travelers 
gather together, they are sure to recall the smell of the places 
they have visited. For them the reek of a fried fish shop can 
recall all the East from Cairo to Singapore; one whiff of camel 
can bring back all Arabia; the smell of rotten eggs can take 
them to Hitton on the Euphrates, or the odor of drying fish to 
Burma. 

Two smells, he suggested, and only two, appeal to all of us. 
Are these smells of universal appeal really limited to two, or 
would it be possible to add to Mr. Kipling’s short list? His 
choice is the smell of the burning fuel over which a man cooks his 
food, and the smell of the hot grease in which he cooks it. A 
whiff of wood smoke, he tells us, can take him back to marches, 
otherwise forgotten, u over unnamed mountains with disreputable 
companions, to day-long halts beside flooded rivers in the rain; 
... to uneasy wakings under a low desert moon and on top of 

1 The Door in the Wall and Other Stories, H. G. Wells. Mitchell Kennerley. 

2 New York Times, February 18, 1914. 


MATERIALS OF DESCRIPTION 


15 


cruel hard pebbles.” Above all it evokes for him that hour 
“when the stars have gone out, and it is too dark to see clear, 
and one lies with the fumes of last night’s embers in one’s nostrils 
—lies and waits for a new horizon to heave itself up against a new 
dawn.” 

It is not only the far East that may be remembered by its 
smells; the far West has 

the dry pungent smell of lichens and dwarf wild flowers up above the 
timber-line; the cool smell of stream beds in fir-clad ravines; the 
smell of glaciers on a hot day; the curiously Oriental smell that 
comes from the chimneys of log-houses burning wood; ... a dusk 
acridly sweet with catnip and wind and mountain-meadow damp¬ 
ness . . A 

W. H. Hudson , 2 writing on the sense of smell, notes: 

It is related of Wordsworth that he was without the sense of smell, 
and that on one occasion when he was sitting on a spring day in his 
flowery garden, the unknown sense suddenly came to him to as¬ 
tonish and delight with the lovely novel sensation. He described it 
as being like a vision of Paradise. A similar vision has been mine at 
frequent intervals all my life; I doubt if its loveliness has been less 
in my case than in that of the poet, to whom it came once as by a 
miracle. When a gust of flowery fragrance comes to me, as when I 
walk by a blossoming beanfield or a field of lucerne, it is always 
like a new and wonderful experience, a delightful surprise. 

Hudson loves Chaucer for the “acuteness of his senses” and his 
“childlike delight in sights and sounds and smells”: 

Reading Wordsworth and Ruskin, nature appears to me as a 
picture — it has no sound, no smell, no feel. In Chaucer you have 
it all in its highest expression; he alone is capable of saying, in some 
open woodland space with the fresh smell of earth in his nostrils, 
that this is more to him than meat or drink or any other thing, and 
that since the beginning there was never anything so pleasant known 
to earthly man. 

1 The Diary of a Dude-Wrangler , Struthers Burt. Scribner. 

2 A Hind in Richmond Park , W. H. Hudson. E. P. Dutton. 


i6 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


Another author whose sensitiveness to smell has survived 
childhood and now helps to make vivid his descriptions of the 
boyhood days of his book-children is Mr. Richard Pryce. To 
his little boy in David Penstephen 1 

Everything smelled different. In the grocer’s shop where some of 
the provisions were bought, there was the most delicious smell that 
David had ever smelt. It was compounded of many things, but 
sugar-candy, dried figs, and coffee were its most recognisable in¬ 
gredients. The molasses and the sugar-cane of the boys’ books, 
which became part of his life later on, always made him think of 
this shop. He carried, indeed, a recollection of it through the length 
of his days. It took its place amongst the nice smells which he 
stored in his mind. Everything had its smell for David’s young 
nostrils: the faces of Georgina’s wax dolls; the tin ducks with the 
shining metallic colours which he “swam” in his bath and which 
followed a magnet; his leaden soldiers; his tops; his box of paints; 
doll’s-house furniture, the little wooden chests-of-drawers par¬ 
ticularly; books, their bindings — a gluey smell; and many things 
which weren’t supposed to have a smell at all, such as marbles and 
glass and china. Natural, then, that for David different countries 
should have their distinguishing smells — different towns even. The 
smell of Brussels, for instance, was quite different from that of 
Antwerp, but both were Belgian, and quite different from French. 
Cookery entered into the smells of all towns. David knew Swiss 
smells (there were not many, somehow) from Italian. Homburg he 
told Betty smelt German — but not a bit like Cologne. 

Perhaps the most convincing proof of the pleasure of smell in 
life and the effectiveness of smell in description may be found in 
Du Maurier’s loving memory of the smell of Paris: 

There were whole streets — and these by no means the least 
fascinating and romantic — where the unwritten domestic records 
of every house were afloat in the air outside it — records not all 
savory or sweet, but always full of interest and charm! 

One knew at a sniff as one passed the porte cochkre what kind of 
people lived behind and above, what they ate and what they drank, 

1 David Penstephen, Richard Pryce. Houghton Mi fflin . 


MATERIALS OF DESCRIPTION 


17 


and what their trade was; whether they did their washing at home 
and burned tallow or wax, and mixed chicory with their coffee, and 
were over-fond of Gruyere cheese — the biggest, cheapest, plainest, 
and most formidable cheese in the world; whether they fried with oil 
or butter, and liked their omelets overdone and garlic in their salad, 
and sipped black-currant brandy or anisette as a liqueur; and were 
overrun with mice and used cats or mouse-traps to get rid of them, 
or neither; and bought violets, or pinks, or gillyflowers in season, and 
kept them too long; and fasted on Friday with red or white beans, 
or lentils, or had a dispensation from the Pope — or, haply, even 
dispensed with the Pope’s dispensation. 

For of such a telltale kind were the overtones in that complex, 
odorous clang. . . . 

And here, as I write, the faint, scarcely perceptible, ghost-like 
suspicion of a scent — a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, generic, 
synthetic and all-embracing — an abstract olfactory symbol of the 
“Tout Paris” of fifty years ago, comes back to me out of the past; 
and fain would I inhale it in all its pristine fullness and vigor. For 
scents, like musical sounds, are rare sublimators of the essence of 
memory (this is a prodigious fine phrase — I hope it means some¬ 
thing), and scents need not be seductive in themselves to recall the 
seductions of scenes and days gone by. 

Oh, that I could hum or whistle an old French smell! I could 
evoke all Paris . . . in a single whiff ! 1 

Senses in contemporary descriptive writing. — It would be 
enlightening for a student to search the work of an author for 
evidence of a wide, varied, accurate, loving use of the senses. 
It was this sort of thing Keats did, and you will remember that 
Stevenson said, “There was never a finer temperament for 
literature than Keats’s.” Amy Lowell points out that ‘ Keats s 
observation and love for poetry combined is shown by the 
passages he marked in the books he read,” and that these scored 
passages show “how often Keats was attracted by descriptions 
of colours, by pictures appealing directly to one or more of the 

1 Peter Ibbetson , George Du Maurier. Harper. 



i8 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


senses.” If each student in a class should select a different 
author and give the class a report of his “ appreciative scorings,” 
the whole group would have the benefit of the reading of each 
member of it. A suggestion as to the form the report may take 
will be found in the following selections from a New York Times 
review of Edward Martin Taber’s Stowe Notes 1 : 

Taber . . . seems to have had a sensitiveness to sound such as 
might have made amends to one who was sightless. . . . His 
journal echoes an infinity of sounds, — the wind fingering at his 
shutters, . . . the clamor of the crows, the unearthly beauty of 
the thrush tongue, the patter of rain on the grass, the thin, wintry 
note of the snowbird in the evergreens. He writes: 

“I sat down to rest under the white pine; at a rod or two distant, 
as I drew toward it, I was aware of its singing. . . . 

“The white pine is a king in eloquence, a wizard in ventriloquism. 
Sometimes his voice is loud, surging in my ears; it lessens, it fades, 
it seems to speak from indefinable distance. 

“There is a fine sibilant tone in the louder and higher notes, and 
yet there is a depth to them that the adjective fails to touch. I have 
never attached much meaning to the phrase, ‘The soughing of the 
wind/ but it seems adequately to describe this sound. 

“The pine falls to silence and then a low, distant moan, the 
rumbling of the wind in the encircling woods, is audible. The wind 
soughs in the trees, grows loud, and dies; it reminds me of a great 
orchestra, when on the inarticulate grumbling of the basses, swells 
the eerie plaint of the violins.” 

And again the journal contains this passage: 

“Night sounds: 

“Of the winds, there is much variety in tone and character. 

“The most frequent here, the west wind, is a wild spirit. All the 
wind voices that thrill and startle are his — wailing cries in despair¬ 
ing accents, sounds of hooting and moaning, and shriller screams and 
whistlings. His attacks are fierce and persistent, too. 

“When at night I hear a low rumbling under the eaves, and the 
trees beginning to roar, I know there’ll be no cessation until either 
the clouds are broken and scattered, or the wind changes its direc' 
tion. 

1 New York Times , June 15, 1913. 


MATERIALS OF DESCRIPTION 


19 

“If from the north, it comes with a cold and steady flow almost 
voiceless, slipping through the bare branches without a perceptible 
sound, perhaps moaning softly at the corners of the house, but always 
in the pine that stands in the dooryard arousing a voice that sighs 
and murmurs with ceaseless sweetness, rising to a thin and airy 
whisper, and again, gathering power, until it sinks to a deep, sonorous 
soughing — a monody infinitely sad and soothing. 

“The south wind is at once blustering and stealthy. His onset is 
almost as terrific as the wild west wind, but when you wait for the 
full force of the gale this outburst presages, there comes a sudden 
lull, a moment of silence almost, when some airy voice in the distance, 
scarcely audible, dies on the ear and there come some light and 
startling sounds, as of the lift of the slats in the shutter, or as if deft 
and invisible fingers tried the fastenings of the window. These bursts 
of the south wind through a leafless orchard will pass like the roll of 
muffled drums.” 

If Taber was sensitive to every stirring sound in all the out-of- 
doors, he was sensitive, too, to every shifting note of color. He 
carried home from his walks the memories of “the glowing maroon, 
the rusty crimson” of the stag-horn sumac; of white wreaths of 
blown smoke along the housetops; of blue shadows on the snow; 
and of the white wings of pigeons flashing against a gray sky. 

Often one recognizes in his notes the memoranda of the landscape 
painted, a sketch in words for future use to serve the same purpose as 
the little penciled sketch your painter of the countryside makes on 
the envelope rummaged for in his pocket. Witness: 

“Sky overcast: interesting spongy clouds to the northeast; ovals 
(lakes) and strips of light metallic blue; strong wind from west- 
southwest; dead leaves in the wind, like animate impish things; 
undersides of bay leaves; a true autumn day. 

“Oh, the charm of bare twigs, the silvery twigs of little beeches! 
Leaves of sweet gum turning soberly a bronze red, like some oak 
leaves.” 

In this manner the student may report not only, as in this 
book review, on sound and sight, but also on smell and taste 
and touch. He will look, too, for the use in description of such 
physical sensations as being wet or dry, hot or cold. He may 
use books like Stowe Notes that are largely descriptive of na- 


20 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


ture — the works of Richard Jefferies, Thoreau, John Bur¬ 
roughs, John Muir, W. H. Hudson, Dallas Lore Sharp, Walter 
Pritchard Eaton, William Beebe, and many others. He may 
read books of travel. But it will probably be most helpful for 
him to study the descriptive element in works of fiction. He 
may examine H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, 
Hugh Walpole, Compton Mackenzie, Richard Pryce, Anne 
Douglas Sedgwick, William McFee, Frank Swinnerton, May 
Sinclair, Ethel Sidgwick, Katherine Mansfield, Stacy Aumonier, 
Constance I. Smith, St. John G. Ervine, Henry James, William 
Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Joseph Conrad, 
Edith Wharton, Mary S. Watts, Booth Tarkington, Joseph 
Hergesheimer, Willa Cather, Ernest Poole, Sinclair Lewis, 
Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Kathleen Norris. He may take 
poetry as well as prose, and turn the pages of Amy Lowell and 
Robert Frost. These lists are, of course, only suggestions. The 
student may make his own choice. He will do well, however, 
to keep to books written in his own generation or in a generation 
not too remote from his own, because writing changes in fashion, 
as everything else does; and he will have difficulties enough in 
learning how to write, without the gratuitous difficulty of un¬ 
learning a manner of writing that will sound bookish and in¬ 
sincere in him, because it was called forth, not by the conditions 
of his own day, but by those of a day now past. This recom¬ 
mendation is not to be misinterpreted as implying anything so 
foolish as that the literature of the past has no meaning or value 
for us. It does not mean even that a detailed study of the 
classics would not be of great service to a young writer to-day. 
It means only that such study is not for the beginner in a brief 
college course. 


CHAPTER III 


THE SUBJECTS OF DESCRIPTION 

Personal, direct impressions of life. — What shall we write 
about? What principle of choice should guide us in the selec¬ 
tion of subjects for description? Possibly this question has 
already been answered for us by the writers whose books we 
have just been consulting. We cannot have failed to notice 
that they all find their subjects close at hand, in the life which 
they see about them, in the life which they themselves are living. 
It is impossible to doubt the nearness, the actuality, the genuine¬ 
ness of the subject matter which Mr. Bennett uses in Riceyman 
Steps , or Mr. Walpole in The Cathedral , or Katherine Mansfield 
in The Garden Party , or Mr. Tarkington in Alice Adams. Indeed 
we may say of description in particular what Henry James 1 
says of the novel, that the only reason for its existence is “that 
it does attempt to represent life.” He writes: 

A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression 
of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or 
less according to the intensity of the impression. 

He repeats: 

. . . The air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to 
be the supreme virtue of a novel — the merit on which all its other 
merits . . . helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there 
they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to 
the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life. 
The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquisite process, 
form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist. 

1 Partial Portraits, Henry James. Macmillan. 

21 


22 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


They are his inspiration, his despair, his reward, his torment, his 
delight. It is here in very truth that he competes with life; it is here 
that he competes with his brother the painter in his attempt to 
render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to 
catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance 
of the human spectacle. . . . All life solicits him, and to “render” 
the simplest surface, to produce the most momentary illusion, is a 
very complicated business. 

Again and again he insists that the writer must “try and catch 
the colour of life itself.” 

This is, of course, no new tendency in creative writing and no 
new principle in criticism. Yet an observer 1 noticed in a 
generation earlier than ours what any reader of student themes 
could confirm from his own experience to-day: that “many a 
man who has never been beyond his own village will be silent 
about that which he knows well, and will fancy himself called 
upon to speak of the tropics or the Andes — on the reports of 
others.” And George Henry Lewes, like Henry James, tells us 
that “unless by personal experience ... a man has gained 
clear insight into the facts of life, he cannot successfully place 
them before us. . . . Let a man look for himself and tell 
truly what he sees. We will listen to that. We must listen to it, 
for its very authenticity has a subtle power of compulsion. 
What others have seen and felt we can learn better from their 
own lips.” 

The beauty of the commonplace. — At this point some one is 
sure to groan, “But there is nothing interesting in our own life, 
our own neighborhood, our own home! It is ordinary and com¬ 
monplace.” Edward Rowland Sill 2 indignantly echoes these 
objections: 


1 The Principles of Success in Literature , George Henry Lewes. Allyn and 
Bacon. 

2 The Prose of Edward Rowland Sill. Houghton Mifflin. 


SUBJECTS OF DESCRIPTION 23 

The years monotonous? The same old seasons, and weathers, and 
aspects of nature? Never anything new to admire or wonder at? 

And he answers roundly and soundly: 

The monotony is in our eyesight, which goes on seeing nothing but 
the common and unvariable things; simply because, from long 
familiarity, these are the easy things to see. 

We may find the same verdict given in a little essay on ‘‘Ac¬ 
quiring a Sense of the Picturesque” 1 : 

Like almost everything else in life, apparently, from a taste for 
olives to one for camembert, the sense of the picturesque seems to be 
an acquired habit with most of us. To learn to see and find pleasure 
in the unusual [but I should go farther and say, with emphasis, 
usual"] aspects of things about us calls for the cultivation of our 
observing faculties in new ways. An artist friend told me of a fellow 
painter he had met in Venice who said he could see nothing there to 
paint. It is this way with many city dwellers. They overlook the 
pictures that confront them on every side. In New York, beyond 
question one of the most picturesque cities in the world, thousands 
pass by the things that He close at hand. . . . Once some one with 
an observing eye, a visitor from the outside who comes to it for the 
first time — some foreign artist maybe, who knows his world — be¬ 
comes enthusiastic over some hitherto undiscovered picture, how they 
begin to confront you at every turn as you walk the streets! . . . 

New York is, indeed, a wonderful and fascinating city, even on 
days of glittering sunfight with blue skies as hard as adamant, every¬ 
thing sharply defined, cut out with cameo sharpness. . . . 

Soften its hard outlines with a film of mist, a gray curtain of rain, 
the soft mystery of falling snow — when all the towers look Hke blue 
hills against the sky — or shut it in under the cover of night, with its 
long vistas of receding fights, and it becomes a city of romance with 
an appeal to the imagination in a thousand ways. 

Mr. LouisUntermeyer 2 points out, in The New Era in Ameri¬ 
can Poetry, how general among the poets of our day is this feeling 

1 Scribner’s, October, 1915. 

2 The New Era in American Poetry, Louis Untermeyer. Henry Holt. 


24 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


for ordinary life and ordinary things: “They have rediscovered 
the beauty, the dignity, I might almost say the divine core, of 
the casual and the commonplace.” 

We may begin, then, with what lies closest to us — our own 
neighborhood, our own street, the shops at which we buy, the 
rooms in which we eat and sleep. 

Test of observation. — But first, to test our seeing eye and 
hearing ear, it may be well for all the members of a class to ob¬ 
serve the same neighborhood, some section near the college, 
so that we may compare records, add to ours if our neighbor’s 
is more complete, and correct inaccuracies. In this way stu¬ 
dents of a college may cover notebook pages with details of 
city avenue or town street. They may bring their notebooks 
to class and find that some of them have ignored the colors 
which others saw — a flight of brown stone stairs, a red brick 
facade, a house front of cream or tan stucco, the crimson and 
green jars in the window of a drug store, the yellow curtains at 
a basement window, the dusty brown of a February hedge, 
the green line of a window-frame, the yellow heap of grapefruit, 
or the green and red pyramids of apples on the stand in front 
of a grocer’s. Some may have had no eyes for the irregular line 
of housetops against the sky; others have had no ears for 
the rumbling of an elevated train or for the grinding and 
clanging of a surface car. Some may not have noticed the 
rhythmical bending and stretching of two workmen pulling 
at a rope. So each learns his own limitations in observation 
and tries to train himself to fill out a complete record. For 
until this has been accomplished, nothing else can be done. 
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 1 puts his “Advice to a Young 
Author” into amusing lines, which are none the less true for 
being doggerel: 

1 Songs of the Road, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. John Murray. 


SUBJECTS OF DESCRIPTION 


25 


First begin 
Taking in; 
Cargo stored, 
All aboard; 
Think about — 
Giving out. 
Empty ship, 
Useless trip! 


CHAPTER IV 


THE METHOD OF DESCRIPTION 

The literary workman as guide. — Now, however, that the 
cargo has been stored, the time comes when we must think about 
giving out. Our accumulations of notes are not description; 
they are only the raw material from which description may be 
fashioned. What, then, is the manner of fashioning it? How 
shall we go about it? Mr. Brownell assures us that “Up to a 
certain point, at least, learning how means learning some one 
else’s how.” We cannot do better than apply for instruction 
to the practiced writer. He may well say to us, in the words 
of Lafcadio Hearn: 

I want to speak to you only as a practical man-of-letters, as one 
who has served his apprenticeship at the difficult trade of literature. 
Please understand that in saying this, I am saying only “I am a 
workman,” just as a carpenter would say to you “I am a carpenter,” 
or a smith, “I am a smith.” . . . But whether the man be a 
clumsy and idle workman, or the best carpenter in town, you know 
that he can tell you something which you do not know. He has 
learned how to handle tools, and how to choose the kind of wood best 
adapted to certain kinds of manufacture. He may be a cheat; he 
may be very careless about what he does; but it is quite certain that 
you could learn something from him, because he has served an 
apprenticeship, and knows, by constant practice of hand and eye, 
how a carpenter’s work should be done. 1 

So we turn for guidance to the literary workman. We shall try 
to choose, not the “clumsy and idle workman,” the “cheat,” 
“careless about what he does,” but, if not the “best workman 

1 Talks to Writers, Lafcadio Hearn. Dodd, Mead. 

26 


METHOD OF DESCRIPTION 


27 


in town,” at least the workman who seems best for our im¬ 
mediate purpose. We shall not ask that he put into words for 
us the secret of his processes; this may not be the sort of thing 
he cares to do. We shall examine his handwork as the art 
student scrutinizes the canvas of the master painter, and try 
to learn from the finished picture how he handled his brush 
and how he mixed his paint; what effects he tried to produce 
and what methods he followed in producing them. Nor need 
we fear that this will destroy for us any of our joy in the beauty 
of literature, for, as Amy Lowell says, “ A work of beauty which 
cannot stand an intimate examination is a poor, jerry-built 
thing.” This is, indeed, equivalent to saying that there is no 
work of beauty which cannot stand an intimate examination. 
And certainly no one can read with more intelligent apprecia¬ 
tion or greater enjoyment than the one who is himself attempt¬ 
ing, however clumsily, the difficult perplexities of construction 
which he sees triumphantly cleared up in the pages under his 
eye. 

Unity of tone: Harmony of material. — With our accumula¬ 
tion of notes in mind, then, we examine what experienced 
writers have made of their notes. We select, naturally, descrip¬ 
tions which show rather clearly the principles of their composi¬ 
tion. No one can read the following paragraph from The 
Pastor’s Wife 1 without realizing the effect the writer aimed at 
and the means she took to achieve it: 

It was raining at Redchester when Ingeborg got out at the sta¬ 
tion . . . the soft persistent fine rain, hardly more than a mist, 
peculiar to that much-soaked comer of England. The lawns in the 
gardens she passed as her fly crawled up the hill were incredibly 
green, the leaves of the lilac bushes glistened with wet, each tulip 
was a cup of water, the roads were chocolate, and a thick grey blanket 
of cloud hung warm over the town. . . . 

1 The Pastor’s Wife. Doubleday, Page. 


28 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


After this rain-soaked English landscape, we may see how Pro¬ 
fessor Brander Matthews 1 uses a February thaw in a like 
manner — hearing, seeing, feeling every detail of the New York 
street only as it is affected by the condition of the weather: 

There had been a hesitating fall of snow in the morning, but before 
noon it had turned to a mild and fitful rain that had finally modified 
itself into a clinging mist as evening drew near. The heavy snow¬ 
storm of the last week in January had left the streets high on both 
sides with banks that thawed swiftly whenever the sun came out 
again, the water running from them into the broad gutters, and then 
freezing hard at night, when the cold wind crept across the city. Now, 
at nightfall, after a muggy day, a sickening slush had spread treacher¬ 
ously over all the crossings. The shop-girls going home had to pick 
their way from corner to corner under the iron pillars of the elevated 
railroad. Train followed train overhead, each close on the other’s 
heels; and clouds of steam swirled down as the engines came to a full 
stop with a shrill grinding of the brakes. From the skeleton spans of 
the elevated road moisture dripped on the cable-cars below, as they 
rumbled along with their bells clanging sharply when they neared 
the crossings. The atmosphere was thick with a damp haze; and 
there was a halo about every yellow globe in the windows of the 
bar-rooms at the four corners of the avenue. More frequent, as the 
dismal day wore to an end, was the hoarse and lugubrious tooting of 
the ferryboats in the East River. 

The opening pages of The Green Mirror 2 are dominated by the 
fog: 

The fog had swallowed up the house, and the house had submitted. 
So thick was this fog that the towers of Westminster Abbey, the 
river, and the fat complacency of the church in the middle of the 
Square, even the three plane trees in front of the old gate, and 
the heavy old-fashioned porch had all vanished together, leaving in 
their place the rattle of a cab, the barking of a dog, isolated sounds 
that ascended, plaintively, from a lost, a submerged world. . . . 

1 Outlines in Local Color, Brander Matthews. Harper. 

2 The Green Mirror, Hugh Walpole. Doran. 


METHOD OF DESCRIPTION 


29 


And November is in every detail of the following description, 
from the rain that slants across the hills to the mist that swirls 
about the mail-carrier at the mail-box: 

Indian summer had vanished as suddenly as it came. All day gray 
clouds had swept low over the prairie, driven by a wild November 
wind that slanted the rain in steely sheets across the hills, caught 
up flying leaves, and bent and lashed the maple boughs; and now, 
in the middle of the afternoon, the kitchen was so dark that 
Mrs. Mueller had to stoop close to the board to be sure she left no 
wrinkles in the clothes she was ironing. ... As she turned toward 
the stove to change her iron, a dead limb fell from a maple near the 
house. She stepped to the window and stood looking out between 
wet leaves the wind had slapped against the pane. Beyond the fallen 
bough the lawn was littered with smaller branches and twigs. In 
the swirling mist she could see the mail-carrier, hours late, turning 
away from the mail-box. ... 1 

Unity of tone: Effect on observer. — But it need not be rain, 
or slush, or fog that keeps the many parts of a subject in one 
tone; it may be sunshine, as it is in the “bright sunshiny 
morning” of “The Paper Windmill” 2 : 

The little boy pressed his face against the window-pane and 
looked out at the bright sunshiny morning. The cobblestones of the 
square glistened like mica. In the trees, a breeze danced and pranced, 
and shook drops of sunlight like falling golden coins into the brown 
water of the canal. Down stream slowly drifted a long string of 
galliots piled with crimson cheeses. The little boy thought they 
looked as if they were roc’s eggs, blocks of big ruby eggs. He said, 
“Oh!” with delight, and pressed against the window with all his 
might. 

The golden cock on the top of the Stadhuis gleamed. His beak 
was open like a pair of scissors and a narrow piece of blue sky was 
wedged in it. “Cock-a-doodle-do,” cried the little boy. “Can’t 
you hear me through the window, Gold Cocky? Cock-a-doodle-do! 
You should crow when you see the eggs of your cousin, the great 

1 “ Where’s Minnie,” Alma Burnham Hovey. The Midland January, 1923. 

2 Men, Women and Ghosts, Amy Lowell. Houghton Mifflin. 


3 ° 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


roc.” But the golden cock stood stock still, with his fine tail blowing 
in the wind. He could not understand the little boy, for he said 
“ Cocorico ” when he said anything. But he was hung in the air to 
swing, not to sing. His eyes glittered to the bright West wind, and the 
crimson cheeses drifted away down the canal. 

It was very dull there in the big room. Outside in the square, the 
wind was playing tag with some fallen leaves. A man passed, with 
a dogcart beside him full of smart, new milk-cans. They rattled out a 
gay tune: “Tiddity-tum-ti-ti. Have some milk for your tea. Cream 
for your coffee to drink to-night, thick, and smooth, and sweet, and 
white,” and the man’s sabots beat an accompaniment: “Plop! trop! 
milk for your tea. Plop! trop! drink it to-night.” It was very pleas¬ 
ant out there, but it was lonely here in the big room. The little boy 
gulped at a tear. 

It was queer how dull all his toys were. They were so still. Noth¬ 
ing was still in the square. If he took his eyes away a moment it had 
changed. The milkman had disappeared around the corner, there 
was only an old woman with a basket of green stuff on her head, 
picking her way over the shiny stones. But the wind pulled the 
leaves in the basket this way and that, and displayed them to beau¬ 
tiful advantage. The sun patted them condescendingly on their 
flat surfaces, and they seemed sprinkled with silver. The little boy 
sighed as he looked at his disordered toys on the floor. They were 
motionless, and their colours were dull. The dark wainscoting ab¬ 
sorbed the sun. There was none left for toys. 

The square was quite empty now. Only the wind ran round and 
round it, spinning. Away over in the corner where a street opened 
into the square, the wind had stopped. Stopped running, that is, for 
it never stopped spinning. It whirred, and whirled, and gyrated, 
and turned. It burned like a great coloured sun. It hummed, and 
buzzed, and sparked, and darted. There were flashes of blue, and 
long smearing lines of saffron, and quick jabs of green. And over it all 
was a sheen like a myriad cut diamonds. Round and round it went, 
the great wind-wheel, and the little boy’s head reeled with watching 
it. The whole square was filled with its rays, blazing and leaping 
round after one another, faster and faster. The little boy could not 
speak, he could only gaze, staring in amaze. 

The wind-wheel was coming down the square. Nearer and nearer 
it came, a great disc of spinning flame. It was opposite the window 


METHOD OF DESCRIPTION 


31 


now, and the little boy could see it plainly, but it was something 
more than the wind which he saw. A man was carrying a huge fan¬ 
shaped frame on his shoulder, and stuck in it were many little painted 
paper windmills, each one scurrying round in the breeze. They were 
bright and beautiful, and the sight was one to please anybody, and 
how much more a little boy who had only stupid, motionless toys to 
enjoy. 

The little boy clapped his hands, and his eyes danced and whizzed, 
for the circling windmills made him dizzy. Closer and closer came the 
windmill man, and held up his fan to the little boy in the window of 
the Ambassador’s house. Only a pane of glass between the boy and 
the windmills. They slid round before his eyes in rapidly revolving 
splendour. There were wheels and wheels of colours — big, little, 
thick, thin —all one clear, perfect spin. The windmill vendor 
dipped and raised them again, and the little boy’s face was glued to 
the window-pane. Oh! What a glorious, wonderful plaything! 
Rings and rings of windy colour always moving! . . . 

Miss Lowell’s description, you will have seen, is a little differ¬ 
ent in its treatment from the others. They drew their oneness 
of effect from themselves; to their harmony of material this 
adds the effect on the little boy through whose reaction the 
scene is reported. Sometimes the attitude of the observer 
toward the subject is expressed even more directly. Mr. Rich¬ 
ard Aldington 1 writes: 

I hate the town I lived in when I was little; 

I hate to think of it. 

There were always clouds, smoke, rain 

In that dingy little valley. 

It rained; it always rained. 

I think I never saw the sun until I was nine. 


The long street we lived in 
Was duller than a drain 
And nearly as dingy. 

There were the big College 
And the pseudo-Gothic town-hall. 

1 Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology. Houghton Mifflin. 



32 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


There were the sordid provincial shops — 

The grocer’s, and the shops for women, 

The shop where I bought transfers, 

And the piano and gramaphone shop 
Where I used to stand 

Staring at the huge shiny pianos and at the pictures 
Of a white dog looking into a gramaphone. 

How dull and greasy and grey and sordid it was! 

On wet days — it was always wet — 

I used to kneel on a chair 
And look at it from the window. 

The dirty yellow trams 
Dragged noisily along 
With a clatter of wheels and bells 
And a humming of wires overhead. 

They threw up the filthy rain-water from the hollow lines 
And then the water ran back 
Full of brownish foam bubbles. 

There was nothing else to see — 

It was all so dull — 

Except a few grey legs under shiny black umbrellas 
Running along the grey shiny pavements; 

Sometimes there was a waggon 

Whose horses made a strange loud hollow sound 

With their hoofs 

Through the silent rain. 

Mr. Aldington very convincingly hates his town; but 
Mrs. Dudeney 1 tells us of Angelina, who loved the house she 
lived in when she was little: 

Angelina loved the paternal shop, with its curved steps leading up 
to the handsome door, with its bowed, small-paned windows where 
the great coloured bottles burned in fires of green, of amber, and of 
crimson. All her life had been spent in the spacious house above the 

1 Set to Partners , Mrs. Henry Dudeney. Duffield. 


METHOD OF DESCRIPTION 


33 


shop. . . . Angelina had one perfect moment every day. ... It 
was when you came in out of the noisy streets and shut the big front 
door and went up those shallow stairs of uncarpeted oak, with their 
carved balustrades. . . . The contrast between the clatter of the 
streets and the cool silence of the house was certainly marked; for 
in those days they had not put down the wood pavement in Cheap- 
side. 

In another novel 1 there is a Jennie who “ liked the crowds, 
the important clamor of locomotives, the smell of people and 
sawdust and coal smoke and stale food strangely commingled, 
the high colors of the magazines flaring from the booths.” And 
if she could draw pleasure from these, judge what would be her 
delight in a flower market! 

Jennie dropped her basket and stood gaping, transfixed. In the 
whole of her twelve years she had scarcely seen a flower unless decay¬ 
ing on some ash-heap; and now these tiers on tiers of bloom and 
foliage encompassing her with multitudinous, undreamed colors, 
shapes, textures, fragrances not only bewildered the child with 
novelty; they filled her with a solemn and painful delight. When 
she could remove her gaze from the tall, noble growths on the topmost 
benches, palms, lilies and what-not (Jennie herself had no notion of 
their names) she found close at hand others of an equal charm, homely 
and dear; trays of cuddling pansies, geraniums in soldier rows, fresh- 
laundered periwinkles, daisies trimly patterned. Jennie stumbled 
along between them, automatically dodging people’s knees and elbows, 
ducking under shelves, bundles, outstretched arms, scraping her small 
shanks against sharp wooden edges here and there, rapt in pagan 
enjoyment. The commonest details of the place fascinated her, the 
clean smell of earth, the very look of a flower-pot mantled with green 
and yellowish mold, of a rusty tin watering can standing on the wet 
bricks. Once or twice somebody glanced for an amused instant 
at the little girl straying aimlessly from aisle to aisle with her round 
rosy face, and round blue eyes staring in a sober gladness; but other¬ 
wise she went unnoticed until, reaching the farther end of the market- 
house, she brought up against a barrow full of potted plants which a 

1 The Rise of Jennie Cushing , Mary S. Watts. Macmillan. 


34 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


man in waistcoat and shirtsleeves was busily transferring to one of 
the benches. 

One and the same scene may be looked at with loathing by 
one observer and with delighted admiration by another. Gopher 
Prairie appalled Carol Kennicott 1 with “its two-story brick 
shops, its story-and-a-half wooden residences, its muddy ex¬ 
panse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle of Fords and 
lumber-wagons.” 

She glanced through the fly-specked windows of the most pre¬ 
tentious building in sight, ... the Minniemashie House. It was 
a tall lean shabby structure, three stories of yellow-streaked wood, 
the corners covered with sanded pine slabs purporting to symbolize 
stone. In the hotel office she could see a stretch of bare unclean 
floor, a line of rickety chairs with brass cuspidors between, a writing- 
desk with advertisements in mother-of-pearl letters upon the glass- 
covered back. The dining-room beyond was a jungle of stained 
table-cloths and catsup bottles. 

But to Bea Sorenson, who “had never before been in a town 
larger than Scandia Crossing, which has sixty-seven inhab¬ 
itants,” Gopher Prairie was a place of enchantment. 

As she marched up the street she was meditating that it didn’t 
hardly seem like it was possible there could be so many folks all in one 
place at the same time. My! It would take years to get acquainted 
with them all. And swell people too! A fine big gentleman in a new 
pink shirt with a diamond, and not no washed-out blue denim 
working-shirt. . . . 

Bea saw 

A drug store with a soda fountain that was just huge, awful long, and 
all lovely marble; and on it there was a great big lamp with the 
biggest shade you ever saw — all different kinds of colored glass 
stuck together; and the soda spouts, they were silver, and they came 
right out of the bottom of the lamp-stand! . . . 

1 Main Street , Sinclair Lewis. Harcourt, Brace. 


METHOD OF DESCRIPTION 


35 


Carol saw “ inside the store, a greasy marble soda-fountain 
with an electric lamp of red and green and curdled-yellow 
mosaic shade.” Bea stood in awe before “the Bon Ton Store — 
big as four barns — my! it would simply scare a person to go in 
there, with seven or eight clerks all looking at you. And the 
men’s suits, on figures just like human.” Carol was disgusted 
by “suits which looked worn and glossless while they were still 
new, flabbily draped on dummies like corpses with painted 
cheeks.” 

Not always love or hate or even the milder liking is the re¬ 
action of the observer to the subject; sometimes it is a quick 
interest in the novelty of a scene or a comfortable response to 
its familiar sameness. 

He had come to town on an earlier train than he was accustomed to 
take, and the people whom he passed were not familiar to him. There 
was a newness to the bright day, even in that, that marked the novel 
undertaking; the air was cold, but the light was golden. Men went 
by with yellow chrysanthemums pinned to their coats and a fresh 
and eager look upon their faces. The clang of the cable-cars had an 
enlivening condensation of sound in distinction to the hard rumble 
and jar of the wagons, but all the noises were inspiriting as part of a 
great and concentrated movement in which the day awoke to an 
enormous energy — an energy so pervading that even inanimate 
objects seemed to reflect it, as a mirror reflects the expression of those 
who look upon it. 

His way lay farther up-town than he had been wont to go, above 
the Wall Street line of work and into that great city of wholesale 
industries which stretches northward. The streets at this hour were 
new to him and filled with new sights and sounds: the apple-stands 
at the corners, being put in order for the day, the sidewalk venders 
with their small wares, were fewer and of a different order from those 
he had been used to seeing. The passers-by were different. There 
were a great many girls in bright hats and shabby jackets, who talked 
incessantly as they walked, and disappeared down side streets which 
looked dark and cold and damp in contrast to the bright glitter of 
Broadway. He turned into one of these streets himself, and walked 
eastward toward the river. 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


36 

As it appeared to him to-day, so had it never appeared to him 
before, and never would again. He might have been in a foreign 
city, so keenly did he notice every detail. The street was filled at 
first with drays, loading up with huge boxes from the big warehouses 
on each side, at the entrances of which men in shirt-sleeves pulled 
and hauled at the ropes of freight-elevators; then he came to grimy 
buildings in which was heard the whir of machinery, and he caught a 
glimpse of men, half stripped, moving backward and forward with 
strange motions. From across the street came the busy rush of 
sewing-machines as some one threw up a window and looked out, and 
a row of girls passed into view with heads bent forward and bodies 
swaying shoulder to shoulder; beyond were men bending over, 
pressing, and the steam from the hot irons on the wet cloth poured 
out around them; and all these toilers seemed no beaten-down wage- 
earners, but the glad chorus in his own drama of work. Between the 
factories there began to show neglected narrow brick dwelling-houses, 
with iron railings and mean, compressed doorways, fronted by 
garbage-barrels; basement saloons; tiny groceries with bread in the 
windows and wilted vegetables on the sidewalk, where women with 
shawled heads were grouped; attenuated furnishing-stores for men, 
with an ingratiating proprietor in the doorway . 1 

There was a little bakery on this corner, with two gaslights flaring 
in its window. Several flat pies and small cakes were displayed 
there, and a limp curtain, on a string, shut off the shop, where a dozen 
people were waiting now. A bell in the door rang violently, whenever 
any one came out or in. Susan knew the bakery well, knew when the 
rolls were hot, and just the price and variety of the’cookies and the pies. 

She knew, indeed, every inch of the block, a dreary block at best, 
perhaps especially dreary in this gloomy, pitiless summer twilight. 
It was fined with shabby, bay-windowed, three-story wooden houses, 
all exactly alike. Each had a flight of wooden steps running up to the 
second floor, a basement entrance under the steps, and a small 
cemented yard, where papers and chaff and orange peels gathered, 
and grass languished and died. The dining-room of each house was 
in the basement, and slatternly maids, all along the block, could be 
seen setting tables, by flaring gas-light, inside. Even the Nottingham 
lace curtains at the second-story windows seemed akin, although they 

1 The Wayfarers , Mary Stewart Cutting. Doubleday, Page. 


METHOD OF DESCRIPTION 


37 


varied from the stiff, immaculate, well-darned lengths where the 
Clemenceaus — grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter, and 
direct descendants of the Comte de Moran — were genteelly starving 
to death, to the soft, filthy, torn strips that finished off the parlor of 
the noisy, cheerful, irrepressible Daleys’ own pretentious home. . . . 
Poverty spoke through the unobtrusive little signs over every bell, 
“Rooms,” and through the larger signs that said “Costello. Modes 
and Children’s Dressmaker.” Still another sign in a second-story 
bay said “Alice, Milliner,” and a few hats, dimly discernible from the 
street, bore out the claim . 1 

Continuity of interest. — We find, then, that we may achieve 
a unity of effect throughout our description by being keenly 
aware of the way in which every detail is influenced by the 
season, the hour of day or night, the state of the weather; 
the way the sunshine falls upon it or the wind blows. We may 
put an observer (ourself or some other) right on the page and 
let the reader get the subject as it is reflected in the observer’s 
response to it. And this method has the further great advantage 
that it carries the reader on from detail to detail, holding the 
hand, as it were, of Jennie or Susan, and being urged along by 
her interest in the scene and by his interest in her. This reader 
is always in our mind. For him we must plan; for him we must 
arrange our material so that he may follow the many details 
with ease and with interest. Now I think that we shall find no 
other way so clear and so compelling as this. It is possible, of 
course, to present our material directly, without any interposing 
personality to shed upon it the light of his reaction to it. It 
is possible to arrange the parts in so orderly a fashion and to 
make the transition from detail to detail so plain that the 
reader may progress without hesitation and without difficulty 
from each one to the next. But unless we have some magic 
of tone or phrase to take the place of the more easily gained 
interest of a boy at the window or a girl in the street, our descrip- 
1 Saturday's Child , Kathleen Norris. Doubleday, Page. 


38 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


tion is likely to be stiff and wooden, to gain no reader, perhaps, 
except the solitary theme-reader, who must, alas, read interest¬ 
ing and uninteresting alike. It cannot be said that the follow¬ 
ing description, which opens Florence Olmstead’s Father 
Bernard’s Parish, l is without interest; but can it be said that it 
would not be more interesting still if Mrs. Halligan had been 
allowed to go beyond the “carpets on the stair” and had been 
our guide through the entire neighborhood? 

Columbus Avenue, in the neighborhood of One Hundredth Street, 
is given over to small shops. They are wedged in beside each other 
in dreary sequence, broken only by the fruit and vegetable stalls that 
gladden the eye with color — plenty of it, fresh and varied. Market¬ 
ers hurry up and down the street in the morning hours, children 
possess it at all times, playing “hop-scotch” in and out among the 
shoppers, shrieking in their ears, or, perhaps, running into the unwary 
with small wagons of wonderful construction. The place is cluttered 
with their belongings. Industrious little girls embroider in groups 
before doors that open into dark hallways. Delivery-wagons are 
lined up along the curb. Sometimes a horse stands with his fore feet 
up on the pavement, soliciting the friendly notice which affectionate 
natures demand, and, here and there, a push-cart man or a knife- 
grinder takes his stand. Beyond these the moving vehicles pass — 
automobiles and trucks. In the centre the surface car clangs its course, 
while overhead runs the elevated road, adding an intermittent din 
to the manifold and prevailing noises. Above the stores, on either 
side of the way, flat rises above flat — the homes of the small trades¬ 
men and their smaller assistants. Each block or two forms a little 
community to itself and has its loves and jealousies, its envyings and 
friendships, with as unfailing certainty as do more pretentious circles 
of society. Perhaps these things are here even stronger and more 
developed, since human nature, like vegetation, flourishes best in 
virgin soil. 

In one of these numerous blocks, in a fourth-floor flat, lived 
Mrs. Halligan, with her son and daughter. She was wont to say with 
pride,“I am eleven years in this same place,” and she told many a tale 
to her gossip, Mrs. Zukerman, of “Zukerman’s Bakery and Lunch- 

1 Father Bernard's Parish , Florence Olmstead. Scribner. 


METHOD OF DESCRIPTION 39 

Room” next door, of “how lovely the house used to be kep’, with 
carpets on the stair.” 

The dramatic method. — There is another reason why 
Mrs. Halligan should hold the stage. She is in the story and of 
it; the writer is outside. And why should any one outside the 
world of the story be brought in to describe, to interpret, to 
explain? Why should not the story itself be all-sufficient? It 
can get itself told adequately in itself and through itself. It 
needs no showman. The intrusion of the writer is often ac¬ 
companied by a running commentary on the story, its scenes 
and its people, which most readers find impertinent in every 
sense of the word — out of place and presumptuous. The case 
against any method of telling the story except through the 
material of the story itself is put thus by Mr. Percy Lubbock 1 
in The Craft of Fiction: 

The simple story-teller begins by addressing himself openly to the 
reader, and then exchanges this method for another and another, and 
with each modification he reaches the reader from a further remove. 
The more circuitous procedure on the part of the author produces 
a straighter effect for the reader; that is why, other things being 
equal, the more dramatic way is better than the less. It is indirect, 
as a method; but it places the thing itself in view, instead of recalling 
and reflecting and picturing it. . . . In the first place he [[the 
author]] wishes the story so far as possible to speak for itself, the 
people and the action to appear independently rather than to be 
described and explained. To this end the method is raised to the 
highest dramatic power that the subject allows, until at last, perhaps, 
it is found that nothing need be explained at all; there need be no 
revelation of anybody’s thought, no going behind any of the appear¬ 
ance on the surface of the action; even the necessary description . . . 

may be so treated that this too gains the value of drama. 

1 The Craft of Fiction , Percy Lubbock. Scribner. 


CHAPTER V 


WRITING THE FIRST CHAPTER 

First chapter of an autobiographical novel. — You will have 
noticed that we have been speaking of our description as a 
story or as part of a story. I think that we shall find this a 
helpful way of regarding our writing. We may set down our 
experiences as though we were writing the beginning of an 
autobiographical novel. And as this sort of novel may be said 
to be to-day one of the most popular vehicles for a writer’s 
impressions of life, and as he is usually at some pains to open it 
with pages, sometimes chapters, of just the kind of writing that 
we have in mind for ourselves, we shall not have the feeling that 
what we write is in the nature of an exercise only, a discipline— 
it is, in its way, literature; and if it is written sincerely it will 
be read with attention and respect. It is in this manner that 
Mr. Walpole begins The Green Mirror , with the neighborhood 
and the house of the Trenchards. The first five chapters of a 
recent novel 1 are given to a most thorough and detailed pres¬ 
entation of the environment of the heroine, — the shops where 
she buys food, the suburb where she lives, her house — its 
kitchen, a bedroom. And the reader gains it all in the way we 
have been recommending, through the alert senses of Celia 
herself. It begins: 

The curb lay beneath the toes of her shoes. Celia stared at it, 
and recognizing that Dean Street had now ended and that Lavender 
Road was sliding away on the other side of Wykeham Rise, she lifted 
her head, shot to left and right a glance which noted traffic, and then 

1 Ten Hours , Constance I. Smith. Harcourt, Brace. 

40 


WRITING THE FIRST CHAPTER 


4 1 


crossed alertly, conscious again for a few minutes of the things 
stationary and moving which filled the gray morning light. ’Buses, 
cars, people, shops — they all drew near and she surveyed them. 
Then her wide blue eyes dropped. Walking briskly and buoyantly, 
she looked only at the surface of pavement immediately before her. 

She saw the lines of brown earth between the paving-stones; she 
saw innumerable legs waggling in front and beside her; masculine 
legs in yellow gaiters, or baggy or tight, or light or dark, trousers; 
and feminine legs under a flop of skirt. Gusts of tobacco smoke and 
petroleum came to her nostrils; sharp sounds cut her ears; once or 
twice she sniffed, and all the time she hummed, not because she was 
happy; not for any reason at all but quite unconsciously. . . . 

Lavender Road, at no time sluggish, was always crowded on 
Saturdays. Along its right-hand side where she was standing, stalls 
were set. You could hardly move, so many were the people looking 
at them, and at the shops, and coming and going up the strip of 
pavement between. 

Celia’s mind ticked off comments. Those apples looked good; 
cheap, too, if they got them from the front, and not from the back 
where they had a different kind altogether. Still, you could get right 
out into the street and stand behind the stall; people did. You had 
to be sharp, or they’d fob any old stuff off on you. Pah! how the 
fish smelt! How could people buy fish off stalls! . . . 

The third person. — You may have noticed, too, that, of all 
the descriptions which we have considered, only one uses the I 
of the first person narrative. In Mr. Aldington’s lines it is I 
— “I hate the town I lived in when I was little” — but in all 
the other passages it is Angelina, or Jennie, or Celia, or Susan, or 
some other. That I is a difficult little word to handle. It has 
a way of obtruding itself uncomfortably upon the attention of 
both writer and reader. Even in a piece of writing to which 
he gave the title, “An Autobiographic Chapter,” 1 Randolph 
Bourne did not use the awkward I but talked of himself as 
Gilbert. “Gilbert,” he began, “was almost six years old when 
they all — Mother, Olga, and baby — went to live with Garna 

1 “ An Autobiographic Chapter,” Randolph Bourne. Dial, January, 1920. 


42 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


in her tall white house.” And he went on with “Gilbert would 
stand on a chair and see dimly through rain-streaming panes” 
and “Gilbert would come in from the garden into the fragrant 
kitchen on baking-day to look for cookies,” and so on. 

In the paper that follows, Ann does for the student writer 1 
and her readers what Gilbert does for Randolph Bourne: 

Ann gazed affectionately up the short street which had been her 
home. There were Shapiro’s Poultry Market and Eidus’s Fancy 
Grocery and Dairy. No one was sitting on the rickety old bread 
boxes near the curb, and the worn green shades of both stores were 
drawn. She guessed that this deserted appearance must be due to 
one of the Jewish holy days, and she recalled with a chuckle how 
angry the Italian women on Beaufort Avenue used to be when Eidus 
would not break his holy day to sell them even so important a thing 
as milk or poppy-seed buns for their husband’s breakfast, or a quarter 
of a pound of butter for their evening meal. She wondered whether 
the same faded blue and green and orange advertising cards were 
hanging in the window; and whether the grocery still smelled of the 
same pungent mixture of cheese and pickles, kerosene and dried 
herring; and whether the same black cat still tried to snooze in the 
show-case by the window, and was prodded by the mischievous 
fingers of the little boys of the neighborhood who ran with every 
penny they could get to Eidus’s to exchange it for whatever candy 
happened to be the fashion of the hour. 

There was Mr. Viola’s incongruous house with its Romanesque 
architecture and its rubbish-strewn space that had once been a 
lawn. Beside the grey stone wall that separated Viola’s yard from 
the trim little green and white house next door, there were stacked 
heaps of empty grape crates, not unconnected, perhaps, with the 
scent of wine which lurked in the air. 

Some association of ideas made her glance across to the new 
house which Policeman Liggett had bought late in the spring. The 
house was brave now with very fancy window shades, — large red 
and green parrots on a yellowish white background. Even the 
window boxes were sportive with red paint and little cockle shells 
neatly placed to form a border for the bright geraniums. 


1 Marian E. Wilson. 


WRITING THE FIRST CHAPTER 


43 


The house next door, which had always reminded Ann of a shoe 
box set on end and neatly punctured with holes for windows and door, 
had not changed a bit: the high stoop was as spotlessly clean as it 
ever had been, the brown shutters of the parlor floor were primly 
closed, the tiny window in the grey door beneath the stoop was shaded 
by the same little ruffled curtain, freshly laundered as always. . . . 

Handling the descriptive material. — Now we are almost 
ready to write our first chapter; but before we begin let us go 
back to the notes which represent our observation of a section 
near our college, and as a last bit of preparation let us get this 
material ready for the reader in as many different ways as we 
can. We need not follow any method to the end unless we like, 
but it would be well to pursue each of them far enough to show 
unmistakably how it could go on if we wished to finish it. Then 
let us decide which of our many approaches we find best suited 
to our material. Are we at a time of the year when the weather 
is our most helpful aid to interpretation? Do we need a person 
as guide? Which of the many possible reactions to the scene 
is the most natural, convincing, and enlightening? 

After this last preliminary we may put our own home neigh¬ 
borhood down on paper. 

Preparation of manuscript. — And here a few words about 
the preparation of manuscript will possibly be necessary. The 
paper commonly used is good white unlined paper, 8jx n inches. 
Manuscript is usually presented flat, fastened with a metal 
clip, or, if folded, folded only once. The first page of a flat 
manuscript or the cover page of a folded manuscript bears the 
name and address (or college class) of the writer and the title 
of the paper. Writing, of course, should appear only on one 
side of the paper. Margins should be pleasantly wide, not only 
at the left of each page, but also at the right and at top and 
bottom. Paragraph indentations should be liberal enough to 
show the paragraphing at a glance. The paper should be 


44 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


typewritten if possible. If it is written by hand, no effort 
should be spared to make it as legible as if it were typed. Black 
ink should be used; a generous space should be left between 
lines; each word should be written compactly without gaps 
between its letters; consecutive words should not be crowded 
together; letters and punctuation marks should be formed 
clearly and simply. Unless a paper is neat and legible and in 
good form it can scarcely expect a reading from a busy theme 
reader. 

Habits of work. — Each person develops his own habits dur¬ 
ing the actual process of writing, and no general recommen¬ 
dations are likely to be helpful to every one. Still for the 
encouragement of those who find it a distasteful task to set the 
first words on paper, it may be said that, in a manner of speaking, 
there need be no first words. If the subject has been kept in 
mind right along, hovering on the outskirts of attention per¬ 
haps, ready to be called to the center and favored with a mo¬ 
ment’s notice whenever a leisure minute occurred, it will have 
been worked and reworked, twisted this way and that, until 
at last it settled into some form that just waited for paper and 
pencil to see itself in the written word. Or if, at first, in spite of 
the writer’s preoccupation with his subject, the written word 
lags stubbornly behind the thought, then it may be remembered 
with comfort that the worker, as well as the player, usually 
warms up after a preliminary bout. Get to work: that is the 
important thing. Push the pencil doggedly across the paper, 
even if the words it writes are words for the wastebasket only. 
When you get to the end of your material and you feel that the 
words are coming more readily at your need for them, take ad¬ 
vantage of the greater fluency. Go back now to the opening 
of your paper and try again. Perhaps there is little — perhaps 
there is much — in your first effort that is worth salvaging. If 
you have written on large sheets of paper, and have left wide 


WRITING THE FIRST CHAPTER 


45 


spaces between the lines, you may revise now with a minimum 
of rewriting. Perhaps there is nothing of your first writing that 
you care to preserve. Then throw it aside and go on to a fresh 
writing. You will do better this time. Use this period of energy 
and fluency to its last minute. Do not, however, think that 
your paper is in its final shape. Put it aside. Come to it again 
after an interval during which you have forgotten the pains and 
the ardors of composition, so that you bring to it the cool, 
critical eye of an outsider, of some other person who will read 
your paper as if for the first time, as if without any intimate 
knowledge of the processes through which it arrived at its 
present stage. Where this second self is puzzled, clarify your 
paper; where he is bored, prune it; where he wants more, ex¬ 
pand it. At last go over it line by line, word by word, to be sure 
that it is at least correct — that it does not offend in sentence 
structure, grammatical agreement, spelling, punctuation. And 
you will not now be ashamed to sign your name to it, for it is 
the best that you can do at present. 


CHAPTER VI 


SINCERITY AND SIMPLICITY IN WRITING 

The goonish style. — It is possible, if this college class is like 
other college classes, that among the papers that have just been 
written there will be found at least one that does not sound at 
all as though it were the work of a young person under twenty 
living in the first half of the twentieth century. And this will 
be so not because it has been written carelessly: the writer will 
have spared no effort to make it very fine indeed. But his way 
of trying to make it fine will have been to strive, not for a 
manner of writing that would be the natural expression of his 
years and his experience, not for anything that would sound like 
his own way of talking, but for some sort of “literary” style, 
demanded, he thinks, by the dignity of pen and ink and paper. 
This form of expression has nothing in common with everyday 
speech. Its words are words of length and weight. In it, two 
syllables are preferable to one syllable, two words to one word, 
and three to two. 

In one of Miss Gale’s stories, 1 Jane Mellish, who has composed 
the dedication to the “Katy Town First Church Ladies’ Choice 
Receipt Book,” asks, “What do you think of the dedication, 
ladies?” 

“It’s beautiful, Jane — just beautiful,” Mis’ Burns told her. 
“There couldn’t no one have expressed it nicer.” 

“I said that when I read it over,” Mis’ Port added. “I said, 
‘She’s done it, this time. Where everybody else would have used one 
word, Jane Mellish has used two.’ We’re all real proud, Jane.” 

1 “White Bread,” Zona Gale. Harper’s Monthly , July, 1916. 

46 


SINCERITY AND SIMPLICITY 


47 


There are writers more sophisticated in many ways than Jane 
Mellish and Mis’ Port whose sense of values in this respect is 
no more sophisticated than theirs. They too are real proud 
when they pile up words to the concealment of anything they 
may have to tell — proud when the words are of a kind to dis¬ 
guise effectually the reality of their subject-matter and to hide 
completely whatever they may possess of genuineness of point 
of view or salt of personality. 

Mr. Frederick L. Allen 1 has hit upon an epithet to brand 
the writing which Katy Town admires. He calls it the goonish 
style, and he defines and illustrates it with such point and wit 
that no one who reads “The Goon and his Style” can persist 
in his goonishness unless he is a wilful, defiant, incorrigible goon. 

“Because the contests in which the university teams take part are 
attended by such keen excitement, let it not be thought by my 
readers that the students who play on these teams are the only ones 
to derive benefit from participation in athletic sports.” 

Here you have a perfect example of a goonish style. I admit it 
reluctantly, because I wrote that sentence myself in all seriousness 
a few days ago; but I admit it positively. 

I was writing an article for a foreign periodical about the university 
with which I am associated. I didn’t want to do the article, but I 
had promised to and had to. It wasn’t one of those cases where the 
author burns to tell his readers the message that throbs in him for 
utterance, or anything of that sort. It was a case where the author 
knows he can’t put it off any longer and sits down miserably and 
grinds it out. Furthermore, it happened in this case that the author 
knew the article would have to be translated, anyhow, and felt that if 
he cut loose and wrote in his usual dashing manner the translator 
would get twisted. He tried very hard to express himself plainly and 
impeccably. The result was, “Let it not be thought by my readers” 
and “derive benefit from participation in athletic sports” sure 
marks of the goonish style. 

A goon is a person with a heavy touch. . . . 

1 “The Goon and his Style,” Frederick L. Allen. Harper's Monthly , 
December, 1921. 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


48 

A goonish style is one that reads as if it were the work of a goon. 
It is thick and heavy. It suggests the sort of oatmeal served at lunch 
counters, lumpy and made with insufficient salt. It is to be found at 
its best in nature books, railroad folders, college catalogues, and 
prepared speeches by high public officials. It employs the words 
“youth” and “lad,” likes the exclamation “lo!” says “one may 
readily perceive” instead of “you can easily see,” and speaks — yes, 
I admit it with shame — of “deriving benefit from participation in 
athletic sports.” 

The railroad-folder variety of goonishness sees fit to tell the reader 
that the hotels and boarding houses along the line “vie with one 
another in offering amusements and recreations to delight the visitor.” 
Lake George, described by a goonish vendor of railroad publicity as 
“alert with pristine life,” is declared by him to be “worthy of national 
acceptance as the rich fulfillment of the vacation hopes of every 
man and woman and child. For loveliness of appearance, healthful¬ 
ness of fresh mountain breezes, and varied resources of entertain¬ 
ment, no place can boast an advantage over this queen of American 
lakes.” 

The goonishness of nature books is usually in inverse ratio to the 
amount of scientific information which they contain. So long as the 
author is content to state facts concerning length of bill, color of fur, 
and number of eggs usually laid, he gives no offence; but beware of 
him when his facts run low and he is moved to wash down his pill of 
fact with a bucketful of rhetoric expressing his love of nature. “The 
dark swamps,” he says, “are made glad by joyous, wonderful song.” 
Or, “Never shall I forget the bright morning when I first beheld a 
flock of titmice. The little chaps bubbled over with merriment, and 
as I watched them hopping from tree to tree, their gladsome songs 
seemed to me indeed the veritable embodiment of the spirit of the 
nuptial season.” 

J. Fenimore Cooper was a mighty goon. . . . “We will profit 
by this pause in the discourse,” wrote Cooper when he was warming 
up for a description of two of his major characters, “to give the 
reader some idea of the appearance of the men, both of whom are 
destined to enact no insignificant parts in our legend. It would not 
have been easy to find a more noble specimen of vigorous manhood 
than was offered in the person of him who called himself Hurry 
Harry.” 


SINCERITY AND SIMPLICITY 


49 


When Charles Lamb and Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt were 
writing those essays that are still the best we have of “talking 
upon paper,” goonishness irritated Hazlitt 1 into denunciation 
more vigorous than Mr. Allen’s. He wrote: 

A word may be a fine-sounding word, of an unusual length, and 
very imposing from its learning and novelty, and yet in the connec¬ 
tion in which it is introduced may be quite pointless and irrelevant. 
It is not pomp or pretension, but the adaptation of the expression to 
the idea, that clenches a writer’s meaning: as it is not the size or 
glossiness of the materials, but their being fitted each to its place, 
that gives strength to the arch; or as the pegs and nails are as neces¬ 
sary to the support of the building as the larger timbers, and more so 
than the mere showy, unsubstantial ornaments. I hate anything that 
occupies more space than it is worth. I hate to see a load of band- 
boxes go along the street, and I hate to see a parcel of big words 
without anything in them. 

The language of common speech. — This gaudy style, 
Hazlitt said, is easy to write. Is it easy to write a simple, 
natural style? Hazlitt himself supplies the answer: 

It is not easy to write a familiar style. Many people mistake a 
familiar for a vulgar style, and suppose that to write without affecta¬ 
tion is to write at random. On the contrary, there is nothing that 
requires more precision, and, if I may say so, purity of expression, 
than the style I am speaking of. It utterly rejects not only all un¬ 
meaning pomp, but all low, cant [slang] phrases, and loose, uncon¬ 
nected, slipshod allusions. It is not to take the first word that 
offers, but the best word in common use; it is not to throw words 
together in any combinations we please, but to follow and avail our¬ 
selves of the true idiom of the language. To write a genuinely famil¬ 
iar or truly English style is to write as any one would speak in common 
conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or 
who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside 
all pedantic and oratorical flourishes. 

The last sentence tells us what should be our standard; or, if 
Hazlitt seems to ask of us qualities that are as yet beyond us, we 
1 “On Familiar Style.” 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


5° 

may apply to our prose Mr. Drinkwater’s 1 less exacting defini¬ 
tion of the language that he looks for in poetry: “the speech 
of the intelligent and vivid, though not necessarily the most 
highly educated members of the community.” 

Mr. Drinkwater is careful to explain that his vivid and intelli¬ 
gent speakers are “not necessarily the most highly educated 
members of the community.” Mr. George Moore goes further. 

In his Conversations in Ebury Street? he tells us that once while he 
was partridge-shooting with a friend in the north of England, he 
showed no interest in the shooting; and on his friend’s asking 
him the reason for his inattention, he answered that he was 
listening to the beautiful English of the gamekeeper. His 
friend, shocked at Mr. Moore’s attributing beautiful English 
to one of the social standing of a gamekeeper, exclaimed, 
“But is not your aim in writing to write the language of good 
society? ” Mr. Moore cried out like a dog whose tail had been 
trodden on, and told him: “Not at all! My object is to sepa¬ 
rate myself as far as possible from the language spoken in good 
society.” To explain what he meant, he drew from his pocket 
a coin so old that its markings were almost defaced. “This 
sixpence,” he said, “represents the language that is spoken in 
society.” 

Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer 3 wrote recently that if he were 
young again and just beginning as an author, and could select 
the place for beginning, the Middle West would be his choice; 
and there, he continued, “I’d write in the language of the 
people, a language rich with local idiom, and absolutely provin¬ 
cial; a prose, I hope, as sweet with the scent of dried hay as it 
was brilliant with early wheat and bitter with death.” Mr. Her- 
gesheimer’s preference is for the language of the wheatfields of 

1 Victorian Poetry , John Drinkwater. Doran. 

2 Conversations in Ebury Street, George Moore. Boni and Liveright. 

3 McNaught’s Monthly , July, 1924. 


SINCERITY AND SIMPLICITY 


51 


the Middle West as Mr. Moore’s is for the speech of the English 
fields and woods. Yet Mr. Drinkwater reminds us: 

There is no telling at any time where exactly you are going to catch 
the true turn of racy or imaginative idiom, and it is as unsafe to 
generalize in favour of the rustic as it is to do so in favour of the 
tutored townsman. Good minds make good speech, and cumula¬ 
tively they give the common diction of the age a character which 
cannot escape the poets when poetry has any health to it, which, to 
do it justice in looking back over five hundred years of achievement, 
is nearly always. 

It cannot escape the prose writer either, unless, of course, the 
prose writer is a goon. 

Pretentious words. — Against all “ this counsel to use the 
language of ordinary speech ” we occasionally hear a voice raised 
in protest. Professor Erskine 1 objects: 

It is our duty, on the contrary, ... to enlarge our vocabulary 
even beyond the words our family and our neighbors make natural 
to us, . . . that we may enrich and refine our style, and render 
our meaning more precise. The temptation to get along with a small 
vocabulary ... is altogether too natural; we do not need this 
premeditated urging to a still greater poverty. 

Is it not, however, precisely enrichment, and not poverty, that 
is the aim of our urging? If our vocabulary is smaller by the 
number of stilted, pretentious words that we drop, who will 
say that it has suffered any real loss? Are “peruse” and 
“replete” words that enrich a vocabulary? Edward Rowland 
Sill cites them as terms “that are never used in honest speech, 
and the employment of which in conversation would make a 
man feel absurd.” Sill 2 is in agreement with our counsellors 
of common speech: 

1 The Literary Discipline, John Erskine. Bobbs-Merrill. 

2 The Prose of Edward Rowland Sill. Houghton M iffl in. 


52 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


The best literature and the best conversation contrive to get on 
with but one vocabulary. ... It is already merry times in litera¬ 
ture when we are no longer afraid of our mother tongue. We in¬ 
stinctively sheer off from any writer who uses what Rogers (“the 
poet Rogers”) called “album words.” . . . When we find the 
ideas common and the words uncommon we have learned that we 
may as well put down the volume, or turn the leaf of the magazine. 

Shall we miss from our vocabulary such words as “overt,” 
“attire,” “perpend”? Mr. Frank Swinnerton is quoted in a 
London literary journal (which is quoted in turn by the New 
York Times) as being distressed whenever he meets with these 
words “or any other pompous substitute for a common word.” 
The London journal had asked a number of well-known writers 
for the “words and phrases they most detest,” and it found 
that the majority of them hate “pedantic and uncommon dic¬ 
tion.” Mr. Thomas Burke prefers “the straight phrase to the 
decorative — e.g., ‘he got up’ rather than ‘he rose’; ‘he 
went away’ rather than ‘he departed’; ‘he knocked him about’ 
rather than ‘he inflicted severe punishment.’” 

Stale words. — Then, too, many of the words that we are 
urged to discard are stale words, words already so often used, 
so often passed from writer to reader that Mr. Moore compares 
them to old coins, their markings worn with much handling 
until they are “almost defaced”; Hazlitt speaks of them as 
“tarnished, threadbare”; Sill calls them “type-metal terms.” 
Of all these figurative epithets hurled at them so scornfully, 
this last finds place, in its French form, in the dictionary 1 : 

cliche. An electrotype or stereotype plate. ... A rigid or 
stereotyped form of expression. 

“Threadbare” as applied to words is there too, but for many of 
us the vividness of the figure is hidden in a word formed from 

1 New Standard Dictionary of the English Language. Funk and Wagnalls, 
1917. 


SINCERITY AND SIMPLICITY 


53 


a Latin past participle — trite , from tero, to rub. Still another 
picturesque jibe — hackneyed — is in English plain enough 
to make us see the poor old word, like Leigh Hunt’s hackney- 
coach horse, with “the dim indifferent eye, the dragged and 
blunt-cornered mouth, and the gaunt imbecility of body 
dropping its weight on three tired legs in order to give repose 
to the lame one.” 

When we charge a writer with using cliches, we mean that he 
is using words hardened by lazy repetition into set, rigid com¬ 
binations which no longer have any freshness of meaning. His 
little cottages always “nestle”; his tall buildings always 
“loom.” His trees “don” green “garments” in the spring 
and “doff” them in the fall, only again to “don garments,” 
this time of other colors. He makes a “carpet” for the earth, 
in one season, of fallen leaves; in another season, of snow. But 
snow may be a “mantle,” too, or a “robe.” In his pages 
almost anything will act as a “sentinel” “guarding” almost 
anything else. 

Sincerity and simplicity of diction. — So that we may be sure 
that we understand one another, it may be helpful at this point 
for each of us to select from his reading some passage that 
seems to him unmistakably an authentic experience in authentic 
words. Class comment will invariably expose words that fall 
below our standard of absolute simplicity and sincerity. No 
“album words” will survive the test of being spoken before a 
group of people who have a reasonably keen sense of the ridicu¬ 
lous. For my example, Mr. Robert Frost’s “The Mountain” 1 
may serve. It begins: 

The mountain held the town as in a shadow 
I saw so much before I slept there once: 

I noticed that I missed stars in the west, 

Where its black body cut into the sky. 

1 North of Boston , Robert Frost. Henry Holt. 


54 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall 
Behind which I was sheltered from a wind. 

And yet between the town and it I found, 

When I walked forth at dawn to see new things, 

Were fields, a river, and beyond, more fields. 

The river at the time was fallen away, 

And made a widespread brawl on cobble-stones; 

But the signs showed what it had done in spring; 

Good grass-land gullied out, and in the grass 
Ridges of sand, and driftwood stripped of bark. 

I crossed the river and swung round the mountain. 

And there I met a man who moved so slow 
With white-faced oxen in a heavy cart, 

It seemed no harm to stop him altogether. 

I must admit that, in following this direction, a member 1 of 
one of my classes “rose to the defense,” as she put it, of the dear, 
familiar phrases, but I have so little fear that you will take her 
too seriously that I am giving you her arguments in their favor: 

Since I have arrived at the point where I no longer need a collec¬ 
tion of stock expressions as a literary rod and staff, I may with safety 
enter upon a defense of those expressions which professors of English 
are wont to label “trite” in bold blue crayon. Such a defense will 
doubtless appeal to harassed freshmen of limited vocabulary, the 
victims of this diabolical practice of literary censorship, and it will 
at the same time afford me an outlet for some long-accumulated 
exasperation. 

Nothing in my college career ever occasioned in me quite the same 
sense of annoyance that I felt whenever an instructor marked as 
“trite” a word or phrase which I had chosen with forethought and 
loving care. For I used these expressions out of a fondness for them 
— here my good taste will naturally be called into question — and 
not because of necessity or laziness. . . . The fact that I made 
more or less frequent use of phrases like “the sentinel trees stood on 
the cliff” or “the ground was carpeted with leaves,” was not an 
indication of any poverty of expression on my part, as some well- 
meaning professors would have had me believe; it was rather the 

1 “I Rise to the Defense,” Elsie Hoertel Parry. Hunter College Echo. 


SINCERITY AND SIMPLICITY 55 

shameless confession of a liking for those outcasts from high literary 
society, whose only fault is a too great popularity. 

This partiality of mine for trite expressions is but another mani¬ 
festation of my fondness for the dear, familiar commonplace things 
of life. It is my reaction from the highly individualistic tendencies 
of the age. To come upon one of these treasured expressions in the 
course of my reading is like seeing the face of an old friend in a crowd 
of strangers. It always calls to my mind the same familiar image. 
And when in turn I wish to convey that image to another, what 
better medium is there than the touchstone of a well-known ex¬ 
pression? . . . 

But if my taste is still open to criticism even after this explanation, 
I at least have the satisfaction of knowing that I am in good com¬ 
pany. Here is John Burroughs, who, in the space of one essay, is 
bold enough to use the expression “carpeted with pine needles” 
twice; in another — horror of horrors — he says that “Nature seems 
to smile upon the old farm house,” thereby committing a double 
offense. And as for Walter Prichard Eaton — I am afraid that he 
must dwell forever outside the pale of good literary society if his 
essays are to be judged solely by the number of trite expressions 
found in them. In “Green Trails and Upland Pastures” Mr. Eaton 
uses variations of “the trees stood like sentinels” no less than six 
times. In the same volume he also uses that favorite victim of the 
blue pencil, “the song-sparrows and the robins were heralding the 
spring,” and Hamlin Garland in “Other Main-Travelled Roads” 
bears him company with “an occasional flock of geese, cheerful har¬ 
bingers of spring.” Again Mr. Eaton, and with him John Burroughs, 
offends the fastidious taste by saying that “the world was bathed in 
sunshine.” . . . 


CHAPTER VII 

CONCRETE AND COMPACT WRITING 


Second chapter of the autobiographical novel. — We began 
our novel with a description of a neighborhood. In Ten Hours 
Miss Smith, even before she describes the house where her Celia 
lives, describes the shops and the stalls where she buys food. 
You probably remember that Dr. Crothers’s four-year-old 
Philosopher found the grocer’s an enchanted country. Two 
of the most delightful of Leigh Hunt’s essays are “Of the Sight 
of Shops.” He cannot bear the horribly neat monotony of 
the stationer’s shelves “with their slates and slate pencils that 
set one’s teeth on edge,” but he feels himself still a little boy 
when he stands before the window of the toy-shop with its 

balls which possess the additional zest of the danger of breaking 
people’s windows; — ropes, good for swinging and skipping, especially 
the long ones which others turn for you, while you run in a masterly 
manner up and down, or skip in one spot with an easy and endless 
exactitude of toe, looking alternately at their conscious faces; — blood- 
allies, with which the possessor of a crisp finger and thumb-knuckle 
causes the smitten marbles to vanish out of the ring; — ... Lillipu¬ 
tian plates, dishes, and other household utensils, in which a grand 
dinner is served up out of half an apple; — boxes of paints, to colour 
engravings with, always beyond the outline; — ... sheets of pic¬ 
tures, from A apple-pie up to farming, military, and zoological exhibi¬ 
tions, always taking care that the Fly is as large as the Elephant, and 
the letter X exclusively appropriated to Xerxes. . . . 

At the pastry-cook’s he remembers “the pleasure of nibbling 
away the crust all round a raspberry or currant tart, in order to 
enjoy the three or four delicious semicircular bites at the fruity 

56 


CONCRETE AND COMPACT WRITING 57 

plenitude remaining.” The fruiterer’s he finds an excellent 
shop: 

Here are the round piled-up oranges, deepening almost into red, and 
heavy with juice; the apple, with its brown red cheek, as if it had 
slept in the sun; the pear, swelling downwards; thronging grapes, 
like so many tight little bags of wine; the peach, whose handsome 
leathern coat strips off so finely; the pearly or rubylike currants, 
heaped in light long baskets; the red little mouthful of strawberries; 
the larger purple ones of plums. . . . 

Amy Lowell 1 too loved a fruit shop: 

He pointed to baskets of blunted pears 
With the thin skin tight like a bursting vest, 

All yellow, and red, and brown, in smears. 


He took up a pear with tender care, 

And pressed it with his hardened thumb. 

“Smell it, Mademoiselle, the perfume there 
Is like lavender, and sweet thoughts come 
Only from having a dish at home. 

And those grapes! They melt in the mouth like wine, 
Just a click of the tongue, and they burst to honey.” 


He went to a pan 
And poured upon the counter a flood 
Of pungent raspberries, tanged like wood. 
He took a melon with rough green rind 
And rubbed it well with his apron tip. 
Then he hunted over the shop to find 
Some walnuts cracking at the lip, 

And added to these a barberry slip 
Whose acrid, oval berries hung 
Like fringe and trembled. 


And we shall find shops fruitful subjects for description, even 
those that are not fruit shops —it must be the nearness of 
1 Men , Women and Ghosts , Amy Lowell. Houghton Mifflin. 




58 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


Leigh Hunt, shameless punster like his friend Charles Lamb, 
that encourages the pun — but shops where vegetables are 
sold, and groceries, and bread and cake, delicatessen, even fish, 
although Celia of Ten Hours rather turns up her nose at it. 

Adequate material. — As we prepare to write this, the second 
chapter of our novel, we shall want to do at least as well with it 
as we did with our first chapter. We shall see to it that eyes, 
ears, nose, palate, finger-tips take in enough material. A 
Columbia professor used to tell — perhaps he still tells — of a 
student who walked along Broadway from Seventy-second 
Street to One Hundred Sixteenth Street, going into each delica¬ 
tessen store and asking for something that no delicatessen 
store would be likely to have, in order to collect a rich store of 
sense impressions. For most of us, one delicatessen store — 
one store of any kind — will probably be enough. 

The most helpful method. — Then, with our memories and 
our notebooks packed, we shall write. Here again, as in our 
first chapter, we shall find it helpful to get our description before 
the reader through the agency of some one in the story. 
Miss Lowell’s fruiterer points to his pears and grapes, not only 
for Mademoiselle, but also for the reader. One student writer 
has a Betty who goes marketing as much for those of us who 
read the paper as for herself: 

Betty loved the rattle of the crisp paper and the gentle thud of 
the packages of breakfast food as they tumbled into Mr. Smitcher’s 
outstretched hands, coaxed down from their shelves by a queer little 
grasping pair of iron fingers on a long stick. Surely the hands of 
the clock hadn’t moved since she had been waiting, and the pendulum 
was swinging very slowly as if it were afraid to tick lest Mrs. Crowley, 
whose complaining voice filled the store, should accuse it of “impu¬ 
dence and such impudence,” as she was now accusing the wide-eyed, 
frightened-looking clerk. Even the grumble and bang of the traffic 
outside could not drown her querulous words. 

It occurred to Betty that she would have a while to wait until 


CONCRETE AND COMPACT WRITING 


59 


Mrs. Crowley had spoken her mind; so she leaned against the snowy 
counter which supported the sparkling dishes and bowls containing 
“things to take out.” The most delicious odor of fish and coffee and 
varnish and pickles and sauerkraut came to her nostrils. She sniffed 
excitedly, like a little dog, and picked up all sorts of interesting smells 
broadcast by the huge cheeses, the fat sides of bacon, and — o-o-o-h 

— what was that lovely smell? She drew a deep breath and looked 
around. Oh, yes! there were the neatly cut, neatly tied, neatly piled 
bundles of firewood, still moist from their night in the woodshed and 
giving off the most fragrant smell, like the one that came into her 
bedroom window at night from the new shingles on the house that 
was being built next door. . . A 

Creative Language. — In this second description of ours we 
shall be sure, too, to keep to simple words: to use pretentious 
words about a delicatessen store or a vegetable market would 
be worse than 

To gild refined gold, to paint the lily; 

it would be to gild the cabbage and to paint the cauliflower. We 
must, however, ask more of our words than that they be natural 
to us and appropriate to our subject. If these words are to 
make our readers see and hear and smell and taste, they must 
be words that give the very sight and sound and smell and taste; 
they must give the thing itself as nearly as words can; they 
must be, as Walter Pater says, “that sort of creative language 
which carries the reality of what it depicts, directly, to the 
consciousness.” Mr. Murry, in his Problem of Style? quotes 
Tchekhov’s praise of Gorky — “When you describe a thing, 
you see and touch it with your hands. That is real writing” 

— and his advice to another friend: “Cut out all those pages 
about the moonlight. Give us what you feel — the reflection 
of the moon in a piece of broken bottle.” Mr. Murry tells us: 

1 Margaret Jones. 

2 The Problem of Style , J. Middleton Murry. Oxford University Press. 


6o 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


Dostoevsky said to a writer who had described the throwing of 
pennies to an organ man in the street below, “I want to hear that 
penny hopping and chinking.” 

Concrete, specific words. — Those “pages about the moon¬ 
light” must have been abstract where they should have been 
concrete, general where they should have been specific. In 
descriptive writing there is no place for this sort of moonshine. 
We do not find it in any description that succeeds in carrying 
over to the reader the sense impressions of the writer. It is not 
about fruits that Leigh Hunt and Amy Lowell wrote, but about 
round piled-up oranges , deepening almost into red or about a 
melon with rough green rind. A student writes not in general 
about candy , but specifically about chocolate fudge evenly cut 
into prim squares , fat sugary dates , buttery yellow popcorn; not 
about cakes , but shout jelly rolls with red spirals of filling and a 
tray of drop cakes like little mountains set on a plain. The little 
shop in the following description 1 is not merely narrow: it is 
so narrow that Rose could barely pass without jostling Mrs. Fein. 
It does, it is true, contain an endless variety of goods, but this 
abstract variety is at once resolved into concrete cans and 
bottles. 

Rose came into Necko witz’s store just in time to hear Mrs. Fein 
say to Mrs. Neckowitz, “A good schmolz herring, please.” 

“They’re all good,” said Mrs. Neckowitz, and she put her hand 
deep down into a barrel and pulled up by the tail a long fat herring, 
dripping with oil. She held it up in the air for a few seconds, and 
then wrapped it in one of the newspapers stacked on the counter 
alongside the mahogany-colored cash register. 

Neckowitz’s store was so narrow that Rose could barely pass 
without jostling Mrs. Fein. Yet the store contained an endless 
variety of goods. On three walls, almost reaching to the ceiling, 
were shelves upon shelves of cans and bottles in brilliant red, blue, 
green, and yellow labels. And as the light came in through the 


1 Anna Paisner. 


CONCRETE AND COMPACT WRITING 


61 


window, it caught the tin rims of the cans, and the silver-colored 
metal tops of the red ketchup bottles, and the gilt metal tops of the 
brown mustard jars, and made them glitter. 

It was, however, the food that Rose could smell that interested 
her and made her mouth water. Rose could smell Mrs. Necko witz’s 
home-made pickled herrings. They were in a large white bowl, — 
many slices of them soaked in vinegar together with little pieces of 
onion and red pepper, spices and cloves. When you asked for ten 
cents’ worth, Mrs. Neckowitz picked up three slices with a large 
wooden spoon, put them in a little wooden platter, and poured a 
spoonful of vinegar over them. Beside the pickled herrings there was 
a bowl of dill pickles, another bowl of black olives, another of pickled 
red peppers, and another of pickled green tomatoes. 

On a blue and white oilcloth in the store window was a chunk of 
smoked salmon, brilliantly pink and oozing with fat, and next to 
it a piece of smoked carp, and next to the carp, stacked in rows, 
yellow smoked whitefish, glistening like metal. 

“Yes, ma’am, what can I do for you? ” Mrs. Neckowitz turned to 
Rose. 

“A good schmolz herring, please,” said Rose. 

“They’re all good,” said Mrs. Neckowitz, and she bent over the 
herring barrel, pulled up a herring by the tail, held it up in the air 
for a few seconds, and then wrapped it in a newspaper. 

Concrete, specific words. — Dostoevsky asked for words that 
would make him “hear that penny hopping and chinking.” It 
is, perhaps, not particularly difficult to make the reader hear. 
The language is rich in “hopping and chinking” words. With 
little effort we can compile long lists of such sound words as 

boom, beat, bang, buzz, blare, chatter, clatter, crackle, click, 
crash, creak, clang, crunch, drip, drum, grind, gush, hiss, 
jingle, patter, plop, pop, purr, rumble, roar, rattle, rustle, sizzle, 
splash, shuffle, scrape, slam, smash, sniff, squeak, squeal, swirl, 
swish, seethe, slap, thump, tinkle, thunder, tap, whir, whack, 
whistle, wheeze. 

We shall find it a helpful exercise to compile our own lists of 
words of sound, and similar lists of words of smell, words of 


62 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


warmth and cold, words of color, words of light and shade. We 
may range through the books that we are reading and jot down, 
in each of these categories and in others, words that seem to us 
admirably concrete and specific. 

Then after we have written the first rough draft of our chapter, 
let us examine the words in it to be sure that they put a clear 
picture before the eyes of the reader, and make him smell and 
hear and taste — in a word, make him share our perceptions of 
the shop through the medium of our concrete, specific words. 

Economy in the use of words. — Every word that we have 
set on paper we must scrutinize to see that it renders the utmost 
descriptive value for the space it occupies. For if we admit 
words that are empty of descriptive significance, we lower the 
level of expressiveness for the whole passage. It is not only 
that these words fail themselves to hold the reader’s interest; 
the whole passage suffers from the lowered tension. These 
words, flat and dull and lifeless themselves, rob the sentences 
about them of animation; they muffle the sound; they blur 
the outline; they take the keenness from every sense impression. 
Somewhere Theodore Roosevelt spoke of “ weasel words,” words 
that suck the meaning out of other words as a weasel sucks an 
egg, leaving only a worthless shell. For the descriptive writer 
such ‘‘weasel words” are seemed, appeared, appeared to be , and 
the like. They are cowardly words, words without the courage 
of their convictions, because what a thing seems to be to the 
senses, it is so far as the senses are concerned — and our only 
concern now is with the senses. Other timid, fumbling usages are 
the passive could be seen, could be heard, and the impersonal one 
could see, one could hear. Betty saw, Betty heard are active and 
direct. Compare 

I saw through the bleary window 

A mass of playthings: 

False-faces hung on strings, 


CONCRETE AND COMPACT WRITING 


63 


Tops of scarlet and green, 

Candy, marbles, jacks . . . 

With covetous eyes I looked again at the marbles, 
The precious agates, the pee-wees, the chinies. . . A 


with 

or 


There could be seen through the bleary window 


One could see through the bleary window. 

In some passages, of course, the sound itself, the sight itself 
suffices, and there is further economy: 

The electric clock jerks every half-minute: 

“Coming! — Past!” 

A spoon falls upon the floor with the impact of metal striking stone, 
And the sound throws across the room 
Sharp, invisible zigzags 
Of silver. 1 2 


If we revise our paper in this manner we shall have a style 
both concrete and compact. We shall be on the road toward 
the goal which Joseph Conrad set for himself: 


My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the 
written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, above 
all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. 3 

1 “The Lighted Window” in Rivers to the Sea , Sara Teasdale. Macmillan. 

2 “Thompson’s Lunch Room” in Men, Women and Ghosts, Amy Lowell. 
Houghton Mifflin. 

3 The Nigger of the Narcissus, Joseph Conrad. Doubleday, Page. 


CHAPTER VIII 


BUILDING THE SENTENCE 

Constructing the descriptive sentence. — We have been con¬ 
sidering words almost as though they were separate blocks with 
which we were to build our structure of description. We have 
been trying to choose only solid, substantial blocks and to pack 
them together close, with a minimum of cement. Now often 
when we find ourselves fumbling clumsily with many words in¬ 
stead of building cleanly with few, saying badly in twenty words 
what could be said better in ten, it is really because of some 
difficulty of construction; it is less a matter of choice of words 
than a matter of sentence structure. Particularly in descriptive 
writing, where there are many details to be worked in somehow, 
do we puzzle over how to combine these details and work them 
into our pattern of sentence and paragraph with the least 
possible waste of words. Take the description of a room. There 
seems to be no end to the details that must be crowded into it. 
How shall we manage so that the words that are necessary to 
bind the details into grammatical wholes do not clutter up the 
passage and obscure the description? 

Dramatic method. — In this difficulty we shall again find an 
answer by letting the description carry itself along with the help 
of some one in it. In the following passage notice how Mr. Wal¬ 
pole 1 leads the reader through a nursery packed with things by 
letting him watch it with Jeremy: 


Jeremy , Hugh Walpole. Doran. 
64 


BUILDING THE SENTENCE 


65 


He watched the breakfast-table with increasing satisfaction — the 
large teapot with the red roses, the dark blue porridge plates, the 
glass jar with the marmalade a rich yellow inside it, the huge loaf 
with the soft pieces bursting out between the crusty pieces, the solid 
square of butter, so beautiful a colour and marked with a large cow 
and a tree on the top (he had seen once in the kitchen the wooden 
shape with which the cook made this handsome thing). There were 
also his silver mug, given him at his christening by Canon Trenchard, 
his godfather, and his silver spoon, given him on the same occasion 
by Uncle Samuel. All these things glittered and glowed in the 
firelight, and a kettle was singing on the hob and Martha the canary 
was singing in her cage in the window. (No one really knew whether 
the canary were a lady or a gentleman, but the name had been Martha 
after a beloved housemaid, now married to the gardener, and the sex 
had followed the name.) 

There were also all the other familiar nursery things. The hole 
in the Turkey carpet near the bookcase, the rocking-horse, very 
shiny where you sit and very Christmas-tree-like as to its tail; the 
doll’s house, now deserted, because Helen was too old and Mary too 
clever; the pictures of “Church on Christmas Morning” (everyone 
with their mouths very wide open, singing a Christmas hymn, with 
holly), “Dignity and Impudence,” after Landseer, “The Shepherds 
and the Angels,” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” So packed 
was the nursery with history for Jeremy that it would have taken 
quite a week to relate it all. There was the spot where he had bitten 
the Jampot’s fingers, for which deed he had afterwards been slippered 
by his father; there the corner where they stood for punishment 
(he knew exactly how many ships with sails, how many ridges of 
waves, and how many setting suns there were on that especial piece 
of corner wallpaper — three ships, twelve ridges, two and a half 
suns); there was the place where he had broken the ink-bottle over 
his shoes and the carpet, there by the window, where Mary had read 
to him once when he had toothache, and he had not known whether 
her reading or the toothache agonised him the more; and so on, an 
endless sequence of sensational history. 

Parallelism and variety. — Now if Mr. Walpole is to be of 
the greatest possible assistance to us in our own writing, we 
must not let him go leaving with us only a general impression 


66 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


of the charm of his descriptive writing: we must try to extract 
from him the secret of the ease with which he manages de¬ 
tails that an unpracticed hand might have strung out in be¬ 
wildering and tiring sequences. We must examine his method 
closely, not shrinking even from setting down our findings in 
terms of syntax. If we thus curiously dissect Jeremy’s delight¬ 
ful nursery, we notice many combinations of details held to¬ 
gether by the same grammatical structure. Jeremy watched , 
and his watching dominates detail after detail of a long com¬ 
pound object — teapot, porridge plates, marmalade jar, loaf 
of bread, square of butter. All these are, of course, in the same 
grammatical construction; but, in order that they shall not 
weary us with their sameness, Mr. Walpole has varied them by 
his use of different modifiers — adjectives, some before their 
nouns and some after them; phrases, some prepositional and 
some participial; even a whole parenthetical sentence, inserted 
casually and conversationally. Then, instead of continuing 
with objects of watched , he breaks the sequence before we tire 
of it; he begins a new sentence with the words, merely transi¬ 
tional, there were also , and for the rest of the paragraph we have 
no combination longer than the grouping of the mug and the 
spoon, a delayed compound subject, its grammatical identity 
emphasized by the repetition of the adjective modifier silver 
and by the phrase modifiers given him at his christening by 
Canon Trenchard , his godfather and given him on the same occa¬ 
sion by Uncle Samuel — also identical in construction and in 
word order and almost identical in length. 

When we reach the second paragraph, we are at once launched 
upon a series of similar constructions, which extend, with little 
interruption and with little variation, to the end of the fairly 
long paragraph. Again the series begins with the words, useful 
only as connective tissue, there were also; and in a more con¬ 
servative handling of sentence structure we should have after 


BUILDING THE SENTENCE 


67 


the word things a colon or a comma and a dash, and after that 
would come the long catalogue of words in the same construc¬ 
tion, words all in apposition with things: the hole in the carpet, 
the rocking-horse, the doll’s house, the pictures. These words 
are variously modified, as were the words in the first series. 
Again the long series has within it minor groupings approxi¬ 
mately parallel — very shiny where you sit and very Christmas- 
tree-like as to its tail; because Helen was too old and Mary too 
clever. And again there is a highly conversational change of 
accent in the parenthetical everyone with their mouths very wide 
open , singing a Christmas hymn , with holly , so that the rhythm 
of the parallel members shall not become too pronounced for 
the informality of the subject and the treatment. After a brief 
interruption this first series is practically continued in a second 
series with a slightly longer rhythm and a slightly different 
grammatical structure. The there is now not the expletive used 
before, but an adverb of place followed, not by subjects modi¬ 
fied for the most part by adjectives and phrases, but by subjects 
each modified this time by a clause, each clause introduced by 
the same word, where — the spot where , the corner where , the 
place where. And here again we have the conversational accent 
of the parenthetical sentence. 

Out of this examination emerge certain principles of sentence 
construction. A writer, we learn, may impart rhythm and 
movement to any number of details by following a certain pat¬ 
tern of sentence structure, and yet that pattern, to be saved from 
monotony, must be varied within itself. As Stevenson 1 puts 
it, “ . . .we are led to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome 
the successive phrases,” but a the balance” may not be ‘ too 
striking and exact, for the one rule is to be infinitely various; 
to interest, to disappoint, to surprise, and yet still to gratify; 

1 On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature , Robert Louis Steven¬ 
son. Scribner. 


68 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


to be ever changing, as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give 
the effect of an ingenious neatness.” The reader unconsciously 
falls into the rhythm of the writer, and on that rhythm he is 
carried from sentence to sentence with a feeling of ease and 
certainty. Yet he must not be lulled into complete repose: 
an occasional shock, if it is pleasant and not jarring, is good for 
him. 

Movement in description. — In the opening pages of The 
Green Mirror, l after Mr. Walpole has described Rundle Square 
and the old house, No. 5, he goes indoors and lets us share the 
drawing-room with young Henry Trenchard. Here he gives 
life to his rhythm scheme by using verbs with more action in 
them than there was in Jeremy’s watching: Henry had wailed 
before the room’s old wall paper; he had sprawled upon the old 
carpet; he had begged to be allowed to play with the collection of 
knickknacks in the glass-topped table. 

Inside the house at about half-past four, upon this afternoon 
November 8th, in the year 1902, young Henry Trenchard was sitting 
alone; he was straining his eyes over a book that interested him so 
deeply that he could not leave it in order to switch on the electric 
light; his long nose stuck into the book’s very heart and his eyelashes 
almost brushed the paper. The drawing-room where he was had 
caught some of the fog and kept it, and Henry Trenchard’s only light 
was the fading glow of a red cavernous fire. Henry Trenchard, now 
nineteen years of age, had known, in all those nineteen years, no 
change in that old drawing-room. As an ugly and tiresome baby he 
had wailed before the sombre indifference of that same old stiff green 
wall-paper — a little brighter then perhaps, — had sprawled upon 
the same old green carpet, had begged to be allowed to play with the 
same collection of little scent bottles and stones and rings and minia¬ 
tures that lay now, in the same decent symmetry, in the same narrow 
glass-topped table over by the window. It was by shape and design 
a heavy room, slipping into its true spirit with the London dusk, the 
London fog, the London lamp-lit winter afternoon, seeming awkward, 
stiff, almost affronted before the sunshine and summer weather. . . . 

1 The Green Mirror , Hugh Walpole. Doran. 


BUILDING THE SENTENCE 


69 


This illusion of life may be extended to almost an entire 
description. Miss Parrish 1 does it in her Harper Prize Novel, 
The Perennial Bachelor: 

. She loved her parlor, almost as much as her conservatory. 
Each fat chair was a friend, the sofa was a lover who said to her, 
“Come, lie in my arms.” To walk on the carpet was to walk on 
crimson roses. Between looped-back crimson window-curtains hung 
cages of canaries and love-birds that she had tamed with the endless 
patience of indolence combined with a sweet nature, and taught 
to perch on her shoulder and peck at lumps of sugar held between 
her lips. Under the cages green iron plant-stands held geraniums 
soft as butterfly wings, their velvet leaves banded with chocolate 
color, growing in pots covered with putty into which she had pressed 
acorns and little pine-cones. She had crocheted the blue and green 
and scarlet worsted covers for the goose-egg baskets in the windows, 
each holding a little bunch of flowers or a feather of fern; she had 
made the wax pond lilies floating on their mirror pools under glass 
shades. And even a picture hanging on the wall was hers — a castle 
on a lake, with mountains and cloud for background. The sky and 
water were painted; and the mountains were of gray sand; the rocks, 
of red sand; and a road, of yellow sand, sprinkled on glue. The castle 
was made of white birch-bark, with its dark reddish lining used for 
the parts in shadow, and the windows and doors painted in with ivory 
black; and, springing from the moss of the foreground, were trees — 
bits of untwisted rope with the strands divided at the top to make 
the limbs. . . . 

Although the parallelism here is not so marked as in Mr. Wal¬ 
pole’s descriptions and the sentences will not repay so close an 
examination, there is a pleasant movement running through the 
passage, carried from sentence to sentence either by the out¬ 
standing verb or verbal form, which always gives the same im¬ 
pression of action, as to walk , hung , held even loved has this 
effect — or by the more striking similarity of the verbs in 
the past perfect tense, had tamed . . . and taught , had pressed , 
reaching, in one sentence, an almost perfect balance, although 
1 The Perennial Bachelor , Anne Parrish. Harper. 


70 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


the grammatical parallelism — she had crocheted; she had 
made — is not reenforced by exact symmetry in the form or 
length of the modifiers. 

Structure of the descriptive sentence. — Students gain a 
great deal from a careful study of sentence building in descrip¬ 
tive writing. It is interesting to note other problems besides 
those which we have been considering — the length of sen¬ 
tence in any passage, whether even or showing marked variation; 
the type of sentence, whether any one type prevails — simple, 
complex, or compound; the openings of sentences, whether the 
words at the beginning serve to connect sentence with sentence; 
the endings, whether vigorous or trailing; the rhetorical form 
of sentence, whether loose or periodic, and, if prevailingly loose, 
as it is almost certain to be, whether giving an impression of 
being at least partly periodic by a distribution of phrase and 
clause away from the end of the sentence or by the use of cor¬ 
relatives and other words that tend to suspend the sense until 
late in the sentence. The main objects of our analysis, however, 
will be the swing of the sentences; their compactness; their 
parallelism or balance. This matter of balance we shall study 
especially, noting whether there is an exact balance of word with 
word, or whether the balance is more a matter of general effect 
than of exact form; whether parallelism is stressed by repeti¬ 
tion; whether the conversational tone of informal prose is pre¬ 
served by breaking the parallelism before it sets too regular a 
pattern. If each member of a class is reasonably discriminating 
in his choice of a passage for analysis and if he fully illustrates 
with quotation the report in which he sets forth the results of 
his investigation, the class should at once see the effect of this 
study in the gain of their own sentences in compactness and 
symmetry. 

Third chapter. — Let them now add to their novels the 
description of one or more rooms, as Miss Smith does at the 


BUILDING THE SENTENCE 


71 


beginning of Ten Hours or as they have seen Mr. Walpole do in 
the early chapters of The Green Mirror. In following this 
assignment the students whose work appears below have 
evidently tried to have their description carried by the swing 
of movement, the second with more obvious recourse to parallel¬ 
ism than the first. 

So it was the downstairs dining-room for once! What a relief 
to set the table there. Big Anna sighed gustily. Upstairs in the 
company dining-room it was strange and stiff and she had to be on 
her guard all the time. Sometimes it was the funny little rugs to 
trip over; sometimes it was the brass grating around the fireplace 
to get her feet all tangled up in. Upstairs there was delicate china 
that you could see through, and a glass-topped table, and a big 
plush-lined box of knives and forks and spoons, — enough to puzzle 
the smartest American. Besides she had fat, slippery rolls to wrap 
up in the starched napkins, and thin glasses to shine. Oh, how she 
hated company! It only meant fuss and plenty of chance to make a 
dumkopf of herself. But downstairs, now, with only the family, it 
was altogether different. Anna glowed at her mistress and the 
children, seven of them — knock wood — waiting impatiently in 
their places for the head of the family to finish washing up. 

Ach! This was what she called a nice room. The painted walls 
were a cheerful red. The woodwork she herself had polished with a 
new evil-smelling oil until it shone in the glare of the two big electric 
lights. That was how she liked it — bright and lively. The chairs 
were just plain black leather and oak, but they were strong and 
when she had dusted them they looked fine. The children could 
bounce on them, but upstairs they had to sit still like so many little 
images. And didn’t the sideboard fix the room up! It was long and 
heavy, with round brass knobs and queer faces of gnomes carved out 
of the wood. Their round oak cheeks glowed because she had rubbed 
them with the new polish. The lace tidy was not so new — there 
were little tears in the fancy border — but it was snowy white and, 
anyway, the three cutglass bowls hid the holes. And what about that 
big figure on the top? The oldest boy had told her it was Shake— 

Shakes-. Well, she couldn’t remember the name, but wasn’t it a 

fine statue? 

You could believe her — it was a good enough place for the grandest 



72 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


people to eat in. The table was long and wide, and under its white 
damask it was covered with a brand new oilcloth. She could smell 
it now, fresh and a little oily — like the hardware store where she had 
been sent to buy it. The curtains, too, just from the laundry, smelled 
clean. They were white and stiff like the starched skirts she had 
worn when she went to church in Munich. They even crackled and 
swished in the same way when the warm gusts from the window made 
them blow out. Neither was the china closet so bad with its glass 
shelves and its collection of tiny ivory figures, delicate wine-glasses, 
fancy candy-boxes, and one or two fans. Only the bookcase was ugly. 
There were little books and big books, thick books and thin books, 
with the untidy pages of pamphlets sticking out between them. All 
colors they were. Why did they need so many anyway? Anna’s 
broad lips pursed scornfully. 

Ah, here was the master. And now she would bring in the big 
deep soup tureen with the good thick mushroom soup. From the 
kitchen her greedy nostrils caught the warm odor of meat roasted 
with just a kleines bit of garlic, of baked apples oozing with sugary 
syrup. Her red hands deftly passed the thick gold-rimmed plates, 
piled high with chopped fiver and onions. She shifted the huge bread- 
dish to make room for the round little jug of red horse-radish; she 
refilled the glass with celery; she poured water into the emptied 
tumblers, the chunks of ice clinking against the sides of the pitcher. 

Well, she was tired. But they had nearly finished — the family. 
Now she could bring in the tea — deep thick cups, and a glass for the 
master. Also she must not forget the cake cook had just baked — a 
warm spongy ginger-loaf filled with crisp half-almonds and wet 
sweet raisins. Her arms on her enormous hips, Anna listened with 
satisfaction to the gulps and smacks of the children. ... It was 
about time they were through. . . . 

Anna began to clear the dishes from the table. She set the chairs* 
against the wall and closed the big double doors after the last retreat¬ 
ing diner. Her ample bosom was stirred by a sigh as she scraped the 
cloth. She got tired down here, yes, but upstairs it was still worse. 
In the downstairs dining-room she was comfortable at least. 1 

I wasn’t the first young Carmody to enjoy my uncle’s kitchen in 
the old home in County Kerry, Ireland; five or six generations of us, 
before me, had hung over its stout half-door or tumbled past it into 
1 “The Downstairs Dining-Room,” Hilda Ginsburg. 


BUILDING THE SENTENCE 


73 


the kitchen. Generations of barefooted youngsters had run over to 
the wide, open fireplace, as I did, and flung themselves on one of the 
broad seats on either side, and stuck out their hardened little toes to 
the warmth of the turf fire; perhaps they had even stirred up the 
sods with the long black poker, or blown them to a cheerful flame with 
the grimy red-leather bellows, as I did: then they must have breathed 
with satisfaction the tangy odor of peat smoke. They probably 
stretched their necks, too, to watch the sparks fly up the chimney, 
and beyond the soot-covered crane and pot-hooks they must have seen 
smutty hams and flitches of bacon; if they looked well enough, per¬ 
haps they saw a tiny patch of blue sky beyond the bend in the 
chimney. 

I wonder whether they too didn’t patter across the earth floor to 
the dresser where the dishes were kept, and where a stone crock of 
buttermilk always stood beside round yellow-meal cakes. I wonder 
whether they didn’t drag over a heavy chair, too, and stand on the 
soogan-covered seat to reach for a mug and to dip it into the crock, 
trying to capture the yellow disks of butter that floated on top. 
Perhaps, munching the cake, they would timidly put a foot on the 
ladder that led up to the shadowy loft where the servant boys slept 
at night, and where all sorts of fairies and pookas were accustomed to 
gather. Above it they could hardly see the rafters, but from them 
hung dark bundles which were flitches of pork, even some pigs heads, 
and maybe the skin of a mink or a weasel. Some one usually called 
me just then, and I suppose the other little Carmodys gulped down 
the last of the cake and swallowed the mugful of milk and bolted out 
again through the open doorway. 1 

1 “A County Kerry Kitchen,” Marguerite Carmody. Hunter College 
Echo. 


CHAPTER IX 

PUTTING ACTION INTO WORDS 

Words of action. — We cannot have followed the recent 
readings from Mr. Walpole and other writers without realizing 
how much the movement of a passage depends upon its verbs. 
In sentences where the verbs serve only to hold the nouns 
and the other words together in grammatical combinations, 
there can be no sense of life; but where the verbs are chosen, as 
we have seen them chosen, for their suggestion of action, they 
supply the sentence with just the quality it needs for an im¬ 
pression of animated movement. Notice Miss Lowell’s verbs 
in “Trades” 1 —her shaving , pounding , glistening , piling up; her 
screw , shingle , draw , saw. 

I want to be a carpenter, 

To work all day long in clean wood, 

Shaving it into little thin slivers 

Which screw up into curls behind my plane; 

Pounding square, black nails into white boards, 

With the claws of my hammer glistening 
Like the tongue of a snake. 

I want to shingle a house, 

Sitting on the ridge-pole in a bright breeze. 

I want to put the shingles on neatly, 

Taking great care that each is directly between two others. 

I want my hands to have the tang of wood: 

Spruce, Cedar, Cypress. 

I want to draw a line on a board with a flat pencil, 

And then saw along that line, 

With the sweet-smelling sawdust piling up in a yellow heap at my feet. 

That is the life! 

Heigh-ho! 

It is much easier than to write this poem. 

1 Pictures of the Floating World, Amy Lowell. Houghton Mifflin. 

74 


PUTTING ACTION INTO WORDS 


75 


Harry Kemp, in the following verses , 1 chooses trod, flung, swept, 
clove, sped, heaped, backed, came rushing out, stacked. There is 
action, by the way, even in his nouns, — whirr, coil, chuff, snort, 
streams. 

The green, fresh jackets of eared corn looked cool amid the vibrant 
heat 

As we trod the stacks, and flung, day-long, the yellow bundles of 
corded wheat 

Into the maw of the threshing machine, while the curved knives 
glinted in the sun 

As they swept with a periodic whirr and clove the bundles, one by one. 
The ever-recurring coil of the belt in a black ellipse sped round and 
round, 

And the chuff and snort of the engine’s breath the lowing of pastured 
cattle drowned. . . . 

Stack after stack our sturdy arms fed into the jaws of the toothed 
machine 

While the blowing-funnel heaped behind the threshed straw separate 
and clean, 

And the farmers backed their wagons up and held brown bags to a 
magic spout 

From which, in intermittent streams, the yellow grain came rushing 
out. 

When amber twilight softly laid its shadows on the rustling corn, 

We stacked our forks, untrussed the belts, and gladly answered the 
supper-horn — 

And, said the foreman, as we sat at board, with hunger whetted keen, 
“Let poets sing of flails and such — But I thank God for the threshing 
machine!” 

And Mr. Husband 2 not only uses, where we should expect 
them, words of vigorous action, pounded, swung, lifted, and 
drop, but he sustains the mood of activity by keeping to words 

1 “The Threshing Machine ” in The Cry of Youth, Harry Kemp. Mitchell 
Kennerley. 

2 America at Work, Joseph Husband. Houghton Mifflin. 


76 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


like slashed , reached out , and ran, where a writer less keenly aware 
of verb values would drop to mere copulatives. 

The long concrete slip slashed the beach lines. Beyond its mouth 
the lake, a brilliant ultramarine, pounded in before the north wind; 
but inside, the quiet water was tawny with riled sand and the stain of 
iron. Against the nearest dock an ore steamer rested its long, low 
body beneath the shadow of a steel trestle that reached out, far 
above it. With sudden motion a grab-bucket swung down on slender 
cables from the trestle and disappeared in the waist of the ship. In 
an instant it lifted on tightened cables, heavy with ore, and swung 
ashore with grinding vibration of wheels and electric motors, to drop 
its contents on the ore pile that ran parallel with the dock. 

Have the student writers of the following papers made the 
best of every opportunity for a verb of action? 

Before I was fairly inside the kitchen I detected a delicate odor in 
the air. A basket of wild grapes stood on the table, filling the room 
with their fragrance. Mother was about to make wild grape jelly, 
and she soon stirred up a pleasant bustle in the kitchen. First we 
stripped the grapes from the stems. Mother’s fingers moved nimbly. 
Deftly and swiftly they picked a half dozen grapes to my one. I 
stopped now and then to lift a cluster to my nostrils and, head tilted 
back and eyes closed, to inhale the delicious perfume. When the 
grapes were all off the stems, Mother washed them, while I measured 
out the sugar, fitting each cup lazily and letting it drift slowly into 
the pot. Mother interrupted my little snowdrift play by calling me 
to run and look at the grapes. The washing had removed their 
frosty bloom and revealed the colors beneath, which seemed to be at 
once intensified and blended by the water. The grapes were a mass 
of pink and rich purple and green. I could not admire them long, for 
Mother put them into a bowl and mashed them vigorously, reducing 
all that beauty to a pulp, which she set over the fire to cook. Very 
shortly she strained the grapes and set the juice to cooking again; 
and while it was bubbling and boiling, she prepared the jelly glasses. 
Such a washing and rinsing and scalding and polishing with snowy 
dish-towels as those glasses received! Such a hurrying about for 
fresh towels and such a beating up of soap-suds as went on! In the 
midst of this housewifely revel, sizzle, hiss-ss-ss! Mother pounced 


PUTTING ACTION INTO WORDS 


77 


upon the cooking jelly, but too late to prevent a whole glassful of the 
precious stuff from boiling over onto the stove, thereby sending up a 
grape-perfumed incense to whatever gods preside over the kitchen at 
canning time. 

Now she poured the jelly into bags of fine cheesecloth, from which 
the juice dripped slowly down into the bowls below in translucent 
purple drops. One more boiling, assiduous skimming, a critical 
testing to see whether it would jell, and the jelly was poured into 
glasses. Mother held one glass up to the light and squinted at it 
with the eye of a connoisseur. The light came through, clear and 
purple. She held the glass to her nostrils and sniffed delicately. A 
reminiscence of country roads and wild things growing, of bright sum¬ 
mer days and soft summer winds came to her. With a satisfied smile 
she set the glass back upon the table. “Forty glasses,” she said, 
“and every one of them a work of art.” 1 

Sewing day was one of the delights of Nancy’s life. On that day 
Mrs. Barsky, the seamstress, came early in the morning and stayed 
until the evening. On that day the most meagre of dinners was pre¬ 
pared, and the beds were made most hastily. 

As soon as Nancy came home from school, she ran into the large 
sunny dining-room, for that was the scene of'action. Mrs. Barsky, 
Mother, and Miriam were all at work. Mrs. Barsky, black-aproned, 
angular, and efficient, was bending over the sewing-machine in the 
corner. The treadle creaked rhythmically under her foot; the 
wheel turned so fast that it made Nancy dizzy to look at it; and 
Mrs. Barsky’s slim, agile fingers skilfully evaded the flying needle. 
The thread snapped suddenly. Nancy marveled at the way Mrs. Bar¬ 
sky wet the end of the thread, twisted it, and drew it through the 
needle’s eye. 

As she sewed, Mrs. Barsky directed her less experienced assistants. 
“Three lengths of that white material will be plenty, Mrs. Post,” 
she would say or “Don’t cut the buttonhole too deep, Miriam.” 
Mother, in a huge white apron, worked at the table in the center of 
the room. Piled up beside her was a heap of thin white material. 
She placed the yellow, black-figured tape-measure against the goods 
and measured off one, two, three yards. With the scissors which 
hung professionally from a black ribbon around her neck she snipped 
the goods and tore it straight across. A cloud of whitish dust arose 
1 “Making Jelly,” Grace Jackman. 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


f 

which tickled Nancy’s nostrils until she sneezed. At the other side 
of the table Miriam, her fingers awkward and slow, was sewing 
buttonholes in Father’s shirts. Desperately her thimbled finger 
pushed the needle through the thick material. Snap! the needle 
broke. Carefully she placed its parts in the little tray at her side. 

Nancy stifled a laugh and filched a piece of bright orange silk from 
Miriam’s basket, for her doll did need a dress. 1 

Fourth chapter. — In a novel of Mr. Pryce’s, 2 small Christo¬ 
pher wonders: 

Didn’t grown-up people ever want to see how things were done? 
Were the sight and sound of the man’s soft digging in the sand with a 
short-handled tool which was half hammer, half pickaxe, nothing to 
them? Look! He had made the hole now and was lifting the big 
cube of stone — which in shape and size reminded Christopher of a 
loaf of English household bread. He was tossing it now to get it into 
position to fit squarely with its fellows — had thrown it deftly into 
the place he had prepared for it, and, with the “hammer end” of his 
implement, was giving it the ringing blows which were somehow as 
music in Christopher’s ears. 

Christopher himself is held by all action, — “the men mending 
the road; the half-naked men taking in logs at the baker’s . . . 
(Come along, Master Christopher!)” And surely “grown-up 
people” are held by it too. We have all seen them gather on 
the brink of an excavation to watch the giant hopper fasten 
its jaws upon a great mouthful of earth and stones, swing it 
over to a waiting wagon, and drop it thundering upon the boards 
beneath. 

The next chapter of our novel may therefore well be a de¬ 
scription of people at work, — women sewing, cooking, or 
cleaning; men making roads, or building houses, or working 
in factory or shop or in any place where we can watch them at 
their work. Before we write we shall see to it that we have 
caught the mood of the action so that our sentences may swing 

1 “ Sewing Day,” Edna Bass. 

2 Christopher , Richard Pryce. Houghton Mifflin. 


PUTTING ACTION INTO WORDS 


79 


along to its rhythm. It is probable that we shall want a shorter 
sentence span here than we did in our description of a room, a 
sharper rhythm. Our sentences here may well be simple, short, 
direct, pounding out the action. And after we have written, 
we shall look to our verbs to make sure that each of them 
carries the sense of action; that it is impossible to substitute 
for any one of them a word which shall more powerfully convey 
movement and life. 


CHAPTER X 


A FEELING FOR WORD VALUES 

The sound value of words. — We have seen that the impres¬ 
sion which any passage is intended to convey to its readers 
depends partly on the rhythm of the sentences and partly on 
the contents of the sentences — that is, on the separate words 
that compose them. And it is not only the sense of the words 
that contributes to this impression, but also their sound. Imi¬ 
tative words, words which attempt an exact equivalent of sound, 
we have already considered. What is to be observed now is 
something less obvious. It is not so much to words like clash 
and clang in the following passage that we need give our atten¬ 
tion, but rather to the harsh combinations of consonants that 
reenforce the discords of these echo-words without themselves 
being echo-words, and especially to the still more subtle effect 
of the quiet music of the last two lines: 

Dry clash’d his harness in the icy caves 
And barren chasms, and all to left and right 
The bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he based 
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang 
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels — 

And on a sudden, lo! the level lake, 

And the long glories of the winter moon. 

Tennyson uses the ugly s sounds and the explosive b’s and the 
jerking, laboring syllables that bring their opening and closing 
consonants sharply together across an inconspicuous vowel — 
bare black cliff, juts of slippery crag, sharp-smitten with the dint of 
armed heels — to strengthen the impression of clashed and 

80 


FEELING FOR WORDS 


81 


clanged. And then, in contrast with his cliffs and crags, he lets 
us have the level lake and the moon, a harmony of long vowels 
— o, a, oo — combined with the liquid grace of the frequent Vs 
and an occasional m, n, r. 

That this use of sound values is unconscious, unconsidered, it 
is impossible for any thoughtful reader to believe. It is surely 
the result of the most careful, painstaking workmanship. Yet 
from even our own experience in practicing the craft of writing 
we must believe also that once a writer becomes critically aware 
of the sound contents of his phrases, once he begins to be con¬ 
cerned about the tone qualities of his words and to prefer this 
synonym to that because of its sound, he will soon find that he 
has an ear for these values and that he has a pen gradually 
becoming accustomed to this additional carefulness now de¬ 
manded of it. 

The atmospheric qualities of words. — The feeling for word 
values goes still further than this sensitiveness to the actual 
sounds of vowels and consonants. It goes beyond anything 
that can be said definitely in words about words. It must almost 
remain unsaid. When we have tried our best to communicate 
a sense of it, there is still something over. Words have meaning 
and words have sound; but, beyond these, words have also a 
quality, a suggestiveness, that cannot altogether be accounted 
for by these. Sometimes it may be a matter of derivation: 
they came to us with the soil from which they have been digged 
still clinging to their roots. Sometimes it is a matter of associa¬ 
tion: they come to us with a light upon them and a music in 
them caught from the tradition in which they have been used 
throughout their history. If we want to see what a feeling for 
these atmospheric qualities of words can do for a writer, we may 
examine Mr. Masefield’s 1 “ Cargoes,” in which he sets himself 
three exercises in different keys of words, variations upon the 
1 Poems , John Masefield. Macmillan. 


82 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


same theme — a ship coming into port with its cargo. In each 
stanza he makes an entirely different kind of music, not through 
changing rhythms, for the verse pattern remains practically 
the same, but solely by means of the tone, the color, the atmos¬ 
phere of the varying words for ship , coming , and cargo: 

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, 

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, 

With a cargo of ivory, 

And apes and peacocks, 

Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine. 

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus, 

Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores, 

With a cargo of diamonds, 

Emeralds, amethysts, 

Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores. 

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke-stack, 

Butting through the Channel in the mad March days, 

With a cargo of Tyne coal, 

Road-rails, pig-lead, 

Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays. 

Amy Lowell enjoyed this exquisite playing with words. In 
one poem 1 she scatters little words upon the paper 

Like seeds about to be planted. 


She writes: 

Bring pencils, fine pointed, 

For our writing must be infinitesimal; 

And bring sheets of paper to spread before us. 

Now draw the plan of our garden beds, 

And outline the borders and the paths 
Correctly. 

1 “Planning the Garden” in Pictures of the Floating World , Amy Lowell. 
Houghton Mifflin. 


FEELING FOR WORDS 


83 


We will scatter little words 
Upon the paper, 

Like seeds about to be planted; 

We will fill all the whiteness 
With little words, 

So that the brown earth 

Shall never show between our flowers; 

Instead, there will be petals and greenness 
From April till November. 

These narrow lines 
Are rose-drifted thrift, 

Edging the paths. 

And here I plant nodding columbines, 

With tree-tall wistarias behind them, 

Each stem umbrella’d in its purple fringe. 
Winged sweet-peas shall flutter next to pansies 
All down the sunny centre. 

Foxglove spears, 

Thrust back against the swaying lilac leaves, 
Will bloom and fade before the China asters 
Smear their crude colours over Autumn hazes. 
These double paths dividing make an angle 
For bushes, 

Bleeding hearts, I think, 

Their flowers jigging 
Like little ladies, 

Satined, hoop-skirted, 

Ready for a ball. 

The round black circles 

Mean striped and flaunting tulips, 

The clustered trumpets of yellow jonquils, 

And the sharp blue of hyacinths and squills. 
These specks like dotted grain 
Are coreopsis, bright as bandanas, 

And ice-blue heliotrope with its sticky leaves, 
And mignonette 

Whose sober-coloured cones of bloom 
Scent quiet mornings. 


8 4 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


And poppies! Poppies! Poppies! 

The hatchings shall all mean a tide of poppies, 
Crinkled and frail and flowing in the breeze. 


There, it is done; 

Seal up the paper. 

Let us go to bed and dream of flowers. 

Figurative words. — In our effort to choose words for their 
vitality, their sound-value, and their atmospheric quality, we 
frequently go beyond the boundaries of actual fact. Miss Lowell 
uses “petals and greenness” rather than flowers and leaves. 
She applies “winged,” not to butterflies, which literally have 
wings, but to sweet peas, which literally have not. Her fox¬ 
gloves are spears. Her China asters “smear their crude colours” 
as though they were painters. Her bleeding hearts jig 

Like little ladies, 

Satined, hoop-skirted, 

Ready for a ball. 

Her hatchings mean a tide, but the waves are waves of poppies. 

Our figurative expressions may be as simple as Katherine 
Mansfield’s figure for Mrs. Stubbs’s shop, which had “two big 
windows for eyes” and “a broad veranda for a hat,” and whose 
sign on the roof, “scrawled MRS. STUBBS’S, was like a little 
card stuck rakishly in the hat crown.” They may, on the other 
hand, be as sophisticated and as mannered as Mrs. Sedgwick’s 
figure for the great musician in her novel Xante 1 : 

Yet the eyes were cold; and touches of wild ancestral suffering, 
like the sudden clash of spurs in the languors of a Polonaise, marked 
the wide nostrils and the heavy eyelids and the broad, black crooked 
eye-brows that seemed to stammer a little in the perfect sentence of 
her face. 

1 Xante , Anne Douglas Sedgwick. Houghton Mifflin. 



FEELING FOR WORDS 


85 

Most readers, however, probably feel that to compare the face 
of a beautiful woman to a sentence in which the eyebrows 
seemed to stammer a little is so far-fetched as to draw attention 
away from the face instead of focussing it upon it. This is the 
danger of searching consciously for a figure: if the search takes 
the writer far from the subject of his description, it will take the 
reader far afield too. 

Another danger that threatens all use of figurative language is 
the danger of triteness. If we look back at the trite expressions 
listed on page 53, we shall find that almost all of them are at¬ 
tempts at figurative expression, stale, blurred figures — the 
echoes of an echo, the shadows of a shade. Yet perhaps trite¬ 
ness must be guarded against not much more zealously in figura¬ 
tive passages than in pages of the most pedestrian literalness. 
Certainly any writer who holds timidly aloof from all figures 
because some may be far-fetched and others may be hack¬ 
neyed is robbing himself of one of the most natural resources of 
language. 

Indeed the greatest number of figures are those that we use 
quite unconsciously, without being aware that we have left 
prosaic literalness behind and that we are using figurative 
language. Many of these expressions we owe to countless 
speakers and writers through the ages who have used words so 
daringly and vividly that we eagerly take up their inventions 
and repeat them until they become part of the language, and 
we use them without a thought of their figurative origin. 
Some one must have been the first to call a uniformed porter at 
a railroad station a red cap; yet we write, “The red cap leaped 
for her bag” with no sense of quoting a figurative expression 
from some unknown artist in words. We say, “All New York 
goes there” without realizing that our unconscious exaggeration 
for the sake of emphasis is listed in rhetoric textbooks as a 
figure of speech under a technical name. It is only when we 


86 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


force ourselves to regard these terms slowly, as we do a moving 
picture which has been slowed up for our entertaimnent, that 
we realize how boldly picturesque they are and how richly our 
speech and our writing are strewn with them. We show a cold 
politeness or a hot dislike. We freeze into silence or flame into 
ecstasy. An eye is sharp, a glitter hard, a smell clean. We hold 
our tongue; we never turn a hair; we put our foot in it. A grace¬ 
ful girl floats or skims along the road; a gull wheels in the sky; 
a man worms his way through a crowd; people come in streams. 
We write “The house struck me . . without causing any 
fear for our safety, and we say that we were thunderstruck with¬ 
out arousing any apprehension. Not only the garden or the 
farm may suffer from a blight, but our hopes, prospects, or 
spirits as well. And landlubbers talk glibly of knowing the ropes, 
getting their bearings, cutting adrift, and taking another tack. 
Thus the common vocabulary is being constantly refreshed and 
invigorated by figurative usages borrowed from speakers in 
every calling and every walk of life; and the writer who wishes 
to avail himself of every resource of the language will draw freely 
from this copious stream. 

Often these figurative expressions retain the like or as of the 
expressed comparison. In his recent book on Words and 
Idioms , 1 Logan Pearsall Smith has collected “some of these 
habitual comparisons which are so numerous in popular speech, 
and of which a good many are established in the standard 
language.” In his fists are such familiar combinations as as 
dull as ditchwater, as fit as a fiddle, as hard as nails, as large as 
life, as old as the hills, as right as rain, as steady as a rock, as stiff 
as a poker. Fit as a fiddle or fine as a fiddle is one of the 
similes for which Edward Rowland Sill 2 asks our admiration 
in “The Charms of Similitude.” 

1 Words and Idioms, Logan Pearsall Smith. Houghton Mifflin. 

2 The Prose of Edward Rowland Sill. Houghton Mifflin. 


FEELING FOR WORDS 


87 


It is surprising [his paper begins] what a pleasure we take in an 
apt similitude. Not only does it enter largely into our enjoyment of 
poetry, but it gives zest to all bright colloquial talk. The voluble 
centre of any group of listeners — on the street or in the drawing¬ 
room— is sure to be heard spicing his narration with the ‘Tike” 
and “as” of the frequent simile. If I were a novelist (as I do not at 
all thank Heaven I am not) I would keep lists of good similitudes; 
not only those of my own invention, — which I should not expect 
to be prosperous, — but those picked up by the wayside in actual 
speech. It is not so much that they adorn the expression of thought 
as that they illuminate it. . . . It used to be supposed that in 
poetry, for instance, figures of speech were for mere ornamentation. 
Now we know that in good poetry they are chiefly used for throwing 
light. So in colloquial speech: the reason we enjoy them seems to 
be that they hit out the idea like a flash. There is nothing the mind 
enjoys, after all, like getting an idea and getting it quick. ... 

Now as we are, in a way, and for the present at least, novelists 
(although, perhaps, we do not at all thank Heaven that we are) 
we may follow Sill’s suggestion and compile lists of good figures 
of speech, figures that seem to us as right as rain, as natural, 
as unforced, as brightening in their effect. 

The fifth chapter. — For the next chapter of our novel let us 
take our Celia or Christopher through a park, or over a country 
road, or along the water front. First, without thinking about 
the elements of style that we have lately been considering, let us 
write as rapidly as we can, trying to set the scene down just as 
it strikes us. Then let us go slowly and carefully over what we 
have written. Does the sound of the words heighten the effect 
that we want to convey? It will be well to read the passage 
aloud so that our ear may help our eye. Is it possible to find 
words with greater power of suggestion? Let us try first one, 
then another in this phrase and in that. As we search for the 
clearest and most effective way of saying what we have in mind, 
does a figurative expression come to us? Let us write it in. Now 
that it is on paper, in unflattering black on white, does it seem 


88 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


natural there? Is it appropriate? Is it fresh? Let us make a 
clear copy of our chapter as this latest revision leaves it and lay 
it aside until another time. 

When the other time comes, how does the passage sound? 
Does it, perhaps, seem labored, affected? If it does, we must put 
it out of sight and write afresh. We must not, however, jump 
to the conclusion, as writers without very much experience 
often do, that, just because we know how we have slaved over 
our description, the reader will become unpleasantly aware of 
the hard work that went into it. We have eliminated and we 
have amplified; we have tried a half dozen words here only to 
reject them all; we have dovetailed phrases together there: 
yet we have not therefore inevitably sacrificed the effect of 
spontaneity. The freshness and the vitality of our original im¬ 
pression will not be hurt — it should be heightened by our 
painstaking workmanship. Only we must be careful to bring 
to our final revision eyes and ears and a mind that have had a 
rest from their recent absorption in this task and that can 
therefore be trusted to judge the result impersonally. 

Some writers may want also to put their Christopher or Celia 
through an imaginative exercise like Amy Lowell’s. A chapter 
of this sort may be added to the novels of those writers who feel 
that the task is a congenial one. Every one will, of course, 
write the description of the outdoor scene. This is what 
Miss Smith does with it in her Ten Hours 1 : 

Along the top of the road stretched Wykeham Common. As she 
crossed from the parallel line of the small gray houses and walked 
through a grove of high leafless elms, only railings separating her 
from the sodden grasses, the wind rolled strongly across the open 
space and drowned her in fresh but not cold air. On either side of 
the narrow asphalt path, the ground was black, and here and there 
glimmering with rain-pools. Repeated rain had made the bare widths 

1 Ten Hours , Constance I. Smith. Harcourt, Brace. 


FEELING FOR WORDS 


89 

between the grass pulpy; the damp breath of soaked dead leaves and 
soaked grass and sod came to her nostrils. Twigs and thin branches 
were scattered beneath the trees, and in the tops of the elms the 
wind roared; on the pensive skyline the lean bushes of the poplars 
swung like pendulums. . . . 

She passed the pond. The three islands in its center were black 
and tangled. The water rose in tiny pyramids, some of their slopes 
wrinkled, while others were smooth like jelly. High against the stone 
wall, the water rubbed, and its lapping murmur and the sibilant 
whispering of the island trees and grasses followed her for some way. 
Once she glanced back, and the pond, brown when she passed it, 
was now steel colored around its lean tufts of trees. She could see 
it heaving, but its sound was no longer audible. . . . 

The common grew wilder. In low waves of yellow soil spaced with 
grass and gripped with gorse, it rushed to the railway lines driving 
through it. Single trees waved above its seats, and files of young 
saplings stood down its paths; and the keen odors of its pools, and 
decaying and sprouting allotments, were puffed across its ways, made 
acrid by the smoke of trains coming and going every minute. . . . 

Beyond it was hooped the white bridge with ’buses and cars 
rattling up and down. On the left of the bridge stretched a row of 
shops and houses divided by the railway and by side-roads. In one 
of these roads Celia lived. 

She reached the end of the common and crossed the road. The 
clouds were breaking apart, the common was swept with silver, blue 
tones stained the gray, and then the sun stood out, barred above and 
below with cloud, and pale yellow gleams floated over the trees and 
gilded the houses. Windows flashed red-gold; a pale mist of gold 
broadened everywhere, and the smokes of the trains hung shining 
over the spikes of the railings. 

Of course it would turn nice just as she was going in! There was 
not much chance of getting out again to-day! 


CHAPTER XI 


DESCRIBING PEOPLE 

All these weeks we have been observing and describing a 
world of streets and shops and houses; as yet, however, there 
are in our world no people. We have, it is true, written about 
people at work, but we were interested in the work as a rhythm 
of movement — not in the workers as people. Now it is time 
to make our reader know the people in our world, the people 
who live in the homes and work in the shops and pass us in the 
streets. How can we do this? How can we make him see them 
as we see them and know them? How can we put them into 
words so that he will get an impression of them as living people? 

“I had seen and known men and women,” writes Sherwood 
Anderson 1 — 

I had seen and known men and women, going from their homes to 
their work, going from their work to their homes, had worked with 
them in offices and shops. On all sides the untold tales looked out at 
me like living things. 

In Russia England France Germany a writer sat writing. Oh, how 
well he did his job, and how close I feel to him as I read! What a 
sharp sense he gives of the life about him! With him one enters into 
that life. . . . There are sentences written by all writers of note 
in all countries that have their roots deep down in the life about 
them. The sentences are like windows looking into houses. 

Such a window, it seems to me, is Walter De La Mare’s 2 
poem, “Old Susan”: 

1 A Story Teller’s Story , Sherwood Anderson. B. W. Huebsch. 

2 The Listeners and Other Poems, Walter De La Mare. Henry Holt. 

90 


DESCRIBING PEOPLE 


91 


When Susan’s work was done she’d sit, 

With one fat guttering candle lit, 

And window opened wide to win 
The sweet night air to enter in; 

There, with a thumb to keep her place 
She’d read, with stem and wrinkled face, 

Her mild eyes gliding very slow 
Across the letters to and fro, 

While wagged the guttering candle flame 
In the wind that through the window came. 

And sometimes in the silence she 
Would mumble a sentence audibly, 

Or shake her head as if to say, 

‘You ally souls, to act this way!’ 

And never a sound from night I’d hear, 

Unless some far-off cock crowed clear; 

Or her old shuffling thumb should turn 
Another page; and rapt and stem, 

Through her great glasses bent on me 
She’d glance into reality; 

And shake her round old silvery head, 

With — ‘You! — I thought you was in bed!’ — 

Only to tilt her book again, 

And rooted in Romance remain. 

F amiliari ty with subject. — You will have noticed that 
Mr. De La Mare has chosen to describe a person whom he has 
known since he was a child. He has seen and he has remembered 
all her little ways, and he makes us see them — her habit of 
keeping her place with her thumb, of mumbling a sentence 
audibly, of turning the page with her shu fflin g thumb, of shak¬ 
ing her head over the goings-on of the people in the book as she 
would over the actions of the little boy himself. Of course, it 
is nothing new for us to find that an author’s best material is on 
his own street, in bis own home; nor is it new for us to find that 
he can make us enter into the life of his home and the people in 
it only if he has observed accurately and fully. 



92 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


Description through action. — Notice, too, that it is Susan’s 
actions that set before our eyes Susan’s appearance — her stern 
and wrinkled face, as she reads; her mild eyes, as they glide 
slowly across the letters; her great glasses, as she bends her 
glance upon the boy; her round old silvery head, as she shakes 
it. It seems indirect as a method: in order to get a description 
of an old woman, we read an account of what she is doing. But 
her action does carry her directly into our view as no author’s 
catalogue of her face, her eyes, her glasses could ever do. Should 
we feel that Mr. De La Mare had given us as sharp a sense of 
Susan’s reality if he had written: “Susan’s face was stern and 
wrinkled. Her eyes were mild. Her head was round and 
silvery ” ? Again, it is not a new idea for us that, in descriptive 
writing, action, movement, is life. 

As a companion piece to “Old Susan” we may choose “Miss 
Liza” 1 : 

Miss Liza used to sew for us 
When we were little folk; 

Her eyes were black like cut-jet beads, 

Her teeth clicked when she spoke. 

Across her breast were rows of pins, 

While dangling from a string 
Of turkey-red around her waist, 

Her scissors used to swing. 

She made us gay checked gingham frocks 
With sashes in the back, 

And when we wriggled, trying on, 

She’d give our heads a crack 
With her big thimble made of steel, 

Or stick us with a pin, 

And then we’d cry so loud and sharp 
That Mother would come in 
To pat the place that hurt, or bring 
A plate of ginger cakes: 

1 “ Miss Liza,” Virginia Taylor McCormick. Boston Transcript. 


DESCRIBING PEOPLE 


93 


Miss Liza’d raise her hands and say: 

“Well this beats all, land’s sakes! 

If these ain’t just the spoiltest brats!” 

Then Mother’d stay a while 
And give us bits of dotted Swiss 
To make doll-clothes, and smile 
And tell Miss Liza not to mind, 

For children did not know 
How hard it was for grown-up ones 
To make their clothes, and so 
Miss Liza’d sew on petticoats, 

With puffs and tucks in slants, 

And lace-edged ruffled muslin drawers, 

Or little boys’ pants. 

Then after supper by the lamp, 

She’d knit and tell us how 

Aunt Annie tried when she was young, 

To milk the spotted cow. 

But best of all the stories was 
The one that Father played 
At scalping Indians and the boys 
Went with him on a raid 
To Farmer Jones’s turkey flock, 

Which scattered in affright, 

And over-turned a hive of bees 
That put the boys to flight. 

So windy nights when fingers seem 
To tap upon the pane, 

I see Miss Liza knitting socks, 

And hear those tales again. 

Here the measure of the verse quickens to keep pace with 
Miss Liza’s briskness. Although the two copulatives ... 
were ....... were ... — are not so good as Mr. De La 

Mare’s verbs, the description opens well enough with eyes like 
cut-jet beads, clicking teeth, and rows of pins; and then it gets 
into its stride with Miss Liza in action, cracking the wriggling 



94 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


children on the head with her thimble and raising her hands and 
exclaiming over their shortcomings; and later, in a quieter mood, 
it settles Miss Liza at the table in the lamp-light, knitting socks 
and telling stories. These actions are as much a part of any 
description of Miss Liza as are her snapping eyes and her click¬ 
ing teeth. We need them not only for their help in imparting 
to our description the movement of life: we need them for 
themselves because they are Miss Liza and they are life. 

Notice the wealth of illuminating action in the following 
selection. In it Mr. Pryce 1 is writing not so much to bring 
Katinka before our eyes as to make her clear to our under¬ 
standing. He is accordingly writing not description but ex¬ 
position. Writing that is purely descriptive would get along 
without his preliminary statement and his running comment. 
This purely descriptive writing, however, would use Mr. Pryce’s 
material, as we have seen; and it would use it, too, not only 
to make us see Katinka, or Susan, or Miss Liza: it would use 
it to make us understand her as our sight of her actions would 
make us understand her in life. Mr. Pryce writes of Katinka: 

She was, as she had said, good with children. . . . She cast a spell 
over the most ordinary things so that a walk became as great an 
adventure as the longest journey David had ever taken; and the 
trivial round was illumined and glorified. From a walk she would 
bring back fir cones which she would sew with grass seed, and, lo, 
presently miniature forests on miniature mountain peaks. She 
showed the children how to plant mustard and cress upon flannel; 
and how a beautiful palm-like plant would spring from a mere carrot- 
top in a saucer of water. Any one could have done this. But the 
power of enchantment — it took a Katinka for that. The saucer was 
a lake, the carrot-top an island in the middle of it. Inhabitants were 
invented to dwell under the shade of its one palm-like tree. Katinka 
knew the way; had the secret; understood or remembered the child- 
mind. . . . 

1 David Penstephen, Richard Pryce. Houghton Mifflin. 


DESCRIBING PEOPLE 


95 


Or she would teach them games. There was Lotto. ... Or she 
would dress dolls — not a bit like just dressing dolls (which David 
affected to despise, but could not help being interested in); or she 
would fold some paper — newspaper would do — into a long cone- 
shaped wedge, and giving it cuts on alternate sides with the nursery 
scissors, would transform it into hanging net-like baskets. . . . She 
was never at a loss. She could transform a wet day when they 
couldn’t go out into something better than a fine one. 

Or Katinka would sing to them, Ihr Kinderlein Kommet, and Ich 
hat’ einen Kamaraden, Keinen bessern finds du nicht, and Im Rosen 
Garten, and Der Winter ist Kommen. . . . 

Comment outside the story.— What we have just said in pass¬ 
ing about the difference between the expository and the de¬ 
scriptive method needs to be emphasized. We are preparing 
ourselves to write descriptions of people, and it is especially in 
describing people that the young writer falls into the use of 
labels. Even the writer who would not dream of labelling his 
street, “Everything added to the dinginess of the street”; or 
his shop, “Nothing detracted from the neatness of the shop”; 
or his room, “All in all it was a cozy room”; or his landscape, 
“It was a beautiful sight”; even this writer, when he describes 
people, sometimes resorts to the label and writes, “She was 
a picture of serene old age.” Perhaps he is unconsciously obey¬ 
ing the impulse that makes the young—the very young — artist 
write under the picture he has drawn, “This is you” or “This 
is a house.” But the writer — not so very young — should 
have the courage of his concrete material. Description should 
present, as life presents, without labels; it is exposition that 
neatly sorts and tickets impressions. In description there 
should be no preliminary explanation, no expository summing 
up, no analysis of character, no reflections of the author. Let 
the author keep out; the reader will do his own reflecting. All 
that he asks of the writer is that he give him the materials on 
which to reflect. 


96 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


Comment within the story. — If we need note an exception 
to this general and ruthless rejection of all philosophizing it is 
this: comment itself may be part of our record—not the 
author’s comment, but the comment of the people in the story. 
Even in the expository passage which we have been examining, 
Mr. Pryce begins in the descriptive way — “She was, as she 
had said , good with children” — although he goes on, in the 
expository way, in his own person. “She was more like a boy 
than a girl, every one said ” is, by virtue of those words every 
one said , kept within the story. Indeed, what every one says 
about the man or woman whom we are describing is often a not 
unimportant part of the record. 

“She was more like a boy than a girl, every one said” opens 
a short passage which not only illustrates the point that we are 
now making but also gives the sort of material that we were 
discussing before our brief digression. It will bring us back to 
our consideration of the materials of our description. It goes 
on 

She was always carrying hoptoads about in her hat, or tearing her 
petticoats climbing trees and sliding down the ice house roof. She 
was sometimes as bold as brass and sometimes one crimson blush of 
shyness, and she had the strangest ways of showing people that she 
loved them, — boasting in front of them in a loud gruff voice, making 
awful faces, twisting one leg around the other, or standing on the 
sides of her feet . 1 

Materials of description. — What a person does is material 
for description. Material to our purpose, too, is the American 
seamstress’s background of lamplight in the friendly room or 
the English servant’s candlelight and quiet. People do not 
live suspended in space; they breathe the air of this room or 
that. Here we see them and here we must describe them if we 
are to open a window through which the reader may look upon 
1 The Perennial Bachelor , Anne Parrish. Harper. 


DESCRIBING PEOPLE 


97 


them. In the places where they live and work, people are 
around them, acting upon them and being acted upon by them; 
we have the lonely boy, or the restless children eager for a 
story. People talk, and we observe what they say and the tone 
in which they say it. They bear about them indications of 
their occupation — rows of pins across the breast, scissors 
dangling on a string around the waist. They wear clothes that 
may be as expressive of what they are or are not as the rooms 
in which they live. The race from which they spring molds 
forehead, nose, cheek bone, jaw. Habits of smiling or scowl¬ 
ing engrave lines about eyes and mouth. All these are our 
material. 

The sixth chapter. — Our sixth chapter will use such material, 
not enumerating it in a neat bloodless catalogue, not setting it 
rigidly in a stiff steel engraving of a description, but presenting 
it as life itself presents it. It must be admitted, of course, that 
it is not impossible, although it is more difficult, for us to write 
a readable description of a person and yet use something other 
than action to keep our writing alive. In the following de¬ 
scription, as the boy stands at his dresser shaving, it is not the 
action that is suggested, but the scrutiny of himself in the mir¬ 
ror. We realize that we are seeing Claude through his own eyes, 
even before we reach the writer’s he thought; and it is this 
interest of the boy in himself that carries the description. 

The circus was on Saturday. The next morning Claude was stand¬ 
ing at his dresser, shaving. His beard was already strong, a shade 
darker than his hair and not so red as his skin. His eyebrows and his 
long lashes were a pale corn-colour — made his blue eyes seem lighter 
than they were, and, he thought, gave a look of shyness and weakness 
to the upper part of his face. He was exactly the sort of looking boy 
he didn’t want to be. He especially hated his head, — so big that he 
had trouble in buying his hats, and uncompromisingly square in 
shape; a perfect block-head. His name was another source of 
humiliation. Claude: it was a “chump” name, like Elmer and Roy; 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


98 

a hayseed name trying to be fine. In country schools there was al¬ 
ways a red-headed, warty-handed, runny-nosed little boy who was 
called Claude. His good physique he took for granted; smooth, 
muscular arms and legs, and strong shoulders, a farmer boy might 
be supposed to have. ... 1 

“ Typical ” people. There is something else about life that 
the inexperienced writer must remember before he describes 
men and women: nothing in life is typical. The manicurist 
is not a typical manicurist, nor the stenographer a typical 
stenographer. Even the professor is not a typical professor. 
In life, people are not types; they are individuals. People are 
different. Only the superficial, indifferent observer sees them 
merged in a uniform pattern. 

What do you think of the student theme that follows? Does 
it show close observation? Does it present its subject in char¬ 
acteristic action? Does it get along without expository com¬ 
ment? 2 

Dr. Benson’s green felt bag and woolly gray overcoat were two 
well-known landmarks of the university. There was a tradition that 
he had inherited them from his father along with his chair in the 
English Department. During lectures, this famous coat, topped 
by a soft gray hat, lay neatly folded on the waste basket. As soon 
as the bell rang, the doctor always shot out his stiff white cuffs, 
firmly grasped his gold pencil, looked over his steel-rimmed spectacles, 
and began to lecture. Settled back in his big swivel chair, he talked 
rapidly while his long big-jointed fingers played with his pencil. As 
the lecture proceeded, his small black eyes sparkled; his sallow, 
deeply lined cheeks grew feverishly red; the nostrils of his large 
humped nose quivered; and his dry, cracked voice rose higher and 
higher. If he made a particularly good point, he put his thumbs into 
the armholes of his vest and teetered back and forth in his chair. 
His thin blue lips then had a dry ghost of a smile on them, and he 
managed to lift his chin out of the high stiff collar that usually en¬ 
gulfed it. In moments of excitement he delighted the students by 

1 One of Ours, Willa Cather. Knopf. 

2 Marion Woods. 


DESCRIBING PEOPLE 


99 


rumpling with his nervous fingers the few white hairs that fringed 
his shiny head until they stood upright. The doctor always illustrated 
obscure points by elaborate diagrams on the board. By the end of the 
hour his neat gray suit was liberally powdered with chalk dust. When 
the class ended, he laboriously pulled his goloshes over his heavy boots 
and his thick woolen socks and wrapped himself in his overcoat. 
Then he clutched his hat, tucked his green felt bag under his arm, 
and hurried away to his next class. 


CHAPTER XII 


THE NOVEL IN WHICH NOTHING HAPPENS: 
NARRATION WITHOUT PLOT 

The step from description to narration. — From presenting 
people in action in description, it is not a long step to presenting 
them in action in narration. It needs only a shift of interest 
from what they look like as they act, to what they are doing as 
they look like that. This sort of narration, it is evident, will 
not have what is called story or plot; but to compensate for 
the lack of this kind of interest it will have another: the interest 
in the spectacle of life even in its most everyday, bread-and- 
butter aspects. Maurice Hewlett wrote novels about maidens 
who cut off their long locks, and, disguised as boys, followed the 
knight of their choice into the forest; but the novel he wanted 
to write was the kind that we are attempting. He confessed: 

I have often wished that I could write a novel in which, as mostly 
in life, thank goodness, nothing happens. Jane Austen, it has been 
objected, forestalled me there, and it is quite true that she very nearly 
did — but not quite. It was a point for her art to make that the 
novel should have form. Form involved plot, plot a logic of events; 
events — well, that means that there were collisions. They may have 
been mild shocks, but persons did knock their heads together, and 
there were stars to be seen by somebody. In life, in a majority of 
cases, there are no stars, yet life does not on that account cease to be 
interesting. . . - 1 

Hewlett found the “real charm” of a book (The Early Diary 
of Frances Burney) in “the series of faithful pictures it con¬ 
tains of the everyday round of an everyday family. Dutch pic- 

1 “The Crystal Vase” in In a Green Shade, Maurice Henry Hewlett. 
G. Bell. 


ioo 


NARRATION WITHOUT PLOT 


IOI 


tures all — passers-by, a knock at the front door, callers . . .; 
a jaunt to Greenwich, a concert at home. . . .” 

The everyday round. — The materials of the story-writer 
are no other, then, than the materials that we have been using 
since we began writing together. The difference, as has just 
been said, is in the emphasis. Now it is not so much what the 
people look like as they go on a jaunt to Greenwich — or to 
Coney Island — or to the country fair; it is the jaunt itself. 
It is hunting, fishing, swimming, skiing. It is getting up in the 
morning and going to bed at night; eating a meal — perhaps 
buying it or cooking it; getting the children ready for school; 
going to work; conducting a club meeting; following the routine 
of a college day; being graduated; looking for a job; going to 
work; coming home from work. It may be the story of a tired 
woman going through the closing tasks of a long day. 

Mrs. Mueller dropped the milking stool beside the last cow and sat 
down heavily. Behind the pointed tops of the evergreen windbreak 
the sunset smouldered dull yellow; near the pasture gate the other 
cows moved restlessly, lumbering shadows in the September twilight. 
The barnyard was full of subdued sound — the crunching of the 
horses in the barn, the slow breathing of the cows, the swish of milk 
against the side of the pail. The woman worked steadily, head bent, 
big arms moving in even rhythm, while the glow faded and dusk 
settled over the fields, blurring the hills into drifts of shadow. When 
the last sprays of milk had cut lightly through the foam, she picked 
up the pail, threw the stool into the corner of the yard, and with a 
slap and a shove started the cow towards the pasture. “Hi, there, 
get out of here,” she shouted hoarsely as she flung open the gate, and 
to the big collie, “Take ’em to the pasture, Pete.” The cows shambled 
down the lane, unhurried by the dog yelping at their heels; Mrs. Muel¬ 
ler leaned against the gate, a gray, clumsy figure in the deepening 
darkness. The sunset had burned down to a streak of silver on the 
horizon, and the evergreens stood black against the fading 
light. . . A 

1 “Where’s Minnie,” Alma Burnham Hovey. The Midland , January, 


1923. 


102 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


It may be the story of a husky competing in a skiing tourna¬ 
ment: 

Swan Swanson drew the first place. There were thirty-three of 
them, stamping and laughing, and joking. He fastened his number 
to the chest of his red sweater, and threw down his mackinaw coat 
and his double yarn mittens. He flapped his arms and stamped his 
feet and climbed the ladder which rose from the hilltop to the peak 
of the slide. The country below him was as white and as smooth as a 
frosted cake, and the evergreens were like candles, ready for the 
match. 

Swan Swanson stood on the platform at the top, and shoved his 
toes into the straps of his skiis and slipped the thong well over his 
heel. The wooden slide, padded with evergreen boughs and covered 
with a layer of snow, packed and firm, was a precipice at his feet. 
In a minute, now, Swan Swanson would slide down that sheer descent 
to the take-off half way down the hill, and he would shoot out into 
space from that take-off like a ball from a cannon, and if he were 
lucky, he would land on his feet somewhere near the blue spruce which 
was planted like a warning in the snow. Swan Swanson felt the mus¬ 
cles ripple in his legs and arms and torso. He laughed. 

There he stood at the top with his great arms folded on his chest. 
There was a bugle call. He heard its echoes in the valley. Then he 
crouched and glided forward and plunged down the steep and slippery 
slide. The air was a whistle in his ears. The trees were a streak be¬ 
fore his eyes. 

He straightened when he reached the take-off. He flung out his 
arms like wings, and like wings they bore him through the air. He 
seemed to be soaring over the tops of the little firs. The wind was 
a hurricane on his face and chest. He looked for the little blue spruce, 
and he saw it, at last, far ahead, on his left. If he had been a hawk, 
he could have reached it with two flaps of his wings. If the slide had 
been steeper ... if his start had been faster. ... But the 
ground was eager for his feet; it drew him down like a magnet. The 
little blue spruce was still three yards ahead of him when he landed 
with a tremendous whack in the snow. His knees bent, and straight¬ 
ened again. Yelping, he coasted triumphantly to the bottom of the 
hill, and waved his arms, and laughed at the crowd. 

Swan Swanson did not immediately climb back to the hilltop. 


NARRATION WITHOUT PLOT 


103 


Instead he stood, as near as he dared, to the little blue spruce. He 
stripped a handful of its juicy needles and chewed them as he waited. 
His eyes narrowed to a little slit when he saw an orange sweater and 
an orange cap at the top of the slide. Lars Olson, who had been first 
last year, was now twenty-first. He was a Baltimore oriole with 
long, yellow toes. Yet he crouched like a cat, and like a cat he 
jumped, claws spread, and like a cat he landed on his feet not two 
yards behind the blue spruce. He grinned at Swan Swanson as he 
passed. 

Swan Swanson snapped a bough from the tree. He struck a piece 
of it through the stitches of his sweater. He glared and frowned and 
spat in the snow and mumbled in Swedish as he climbed with his long 
ski is over his shoulder past the crowd to the top of the hill. 

The bugle notes, this second time, were clear and true and very 
cold. Swan Swanson crouched even lower than Lars Olson; he 
leaped even higher; he landed within four feet of the blue spruce. 
His laugh echoed in the valley as he veered to the left at the bottom 
of the hill. 

A second time Swan Swanson waited by the blue spruce until he 
saw the orange streak of Lars Olson’s body on the sky. He saw the 
grooves in the under side of Lars Olson’s skiis. Lars Olson seemed to 
keep himself aloft with the flapping of his long orange arms. He 
seemed to draw his knees up, so that his skiis cleared the snow. 
While he floated and soared, Swan Swanson chewed the ends of his 
yellow moustache. 

The skiis whacked on the snow. If Lars Olson had been ten feet 
to the left, he would have landed on the blue spruce. As it was, his 
second jump exceeded Swan Swanson’s by more than a yard . . . 
provided, of course, he could keep his balance. Otherwise, Swan 
Swanson knew, as he bent to watch, that Olson might as well not 
have jumped at all. 

Lars Olson struggled to right himself. He twisted and wriggled and 
pawed the air. He snorted and sputtered. He swore. He lurched, 
and caught himself; lurched again, and caught himself . . . and he 
toppled, at last, still struggling, into a drift. He rolled over down the 
bank. His skiis spun like pinwheels on the Fourth of July. 

Swan Swanson laughed until he doubled up. He thumped his knees 
and his broad red chest. He danced in the snow. He shook the snow 
from the boughs of the little blue spruce. Like a giant, now, he strode 


io4 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


up the snow banks. His hearty laugh bounded down the hillside. 
His long skiis were like feathers on his wide shoulder. 

He could now hardly wait for the bugle call. He looked, as he 
hurtled down, for the green-blue cone of the spruce. He flapped his 
great red arms and drew up his long yellow feet. And he saw, as he 
soared, the tip of the blue spruce under his hand. 

He was jolted by the shock of his landing. The red tips of his skiis 
tried to meet and cross and throw him to the ground. He struggled 
to hold them straight. He doubled up and twisted half way around 
and pawed the air. He grunted and moaned and swore. He lurched, 
and caught himself; and lurched again, and caught himself again. 
He had no idea where he was, or how much farther he had to go when 
he heard the cheers of the crowd. They were shouting: “Swan! 
Swan! Hi Swan!” Still gesticulating like a clown, Swan Swanson 
swerved into a snow bank at the foot of the hill, and stood upright, 
with his arms outspread. He laughed, because around the corner of 
the log house, he saw Lars Olson hitching his team to his sleigh. 1 

Miss Parrish 2 suggests what can be done with some such 
subject as making Christmas decorations: 

They all went up to the Sunday school room in the evening, to 
make the Christmas decorations for the church by the light of the 
dim oil lamps in their brackets. Lily and Victor made little bunches 
of cedar and laurel — two sprays of laurel and one of cedar, and then 
two sprays of cedar and one of laurel — and handed them up to the 
others, who bound them with string on long ropes. Lily had tried to 
make the ropes, but her sprays always came tumbling out, just as 
poor Aunt Priscilla’s did. How fragrant the evergreens were, and 
how black they made everyone’s hands! . . . 

When the decorations were finished, the ropes and the wreaths, 
and the big star of box and holly to hang over the chancel, and when 
Mr. Almond’s knife was found, the scraps of pine and cedar were 
burnt in the stove, roaring up sudden and white, and then popping 
like little pistol shots. How fragrant! They all gathered around 
the stove to warm themselves before going out into the winter night, 
while Uncle Willie stood on a chair and blew out the lamps. 

1 “The'Blue Spruce,” Winifred Sanford. American Mercury, May, 1926. 

2 The Perennial Bachelor , Anne Parrish. Harper. 


NARRATION WITHOUT PLOT 


io 5 

The seventh chapter. — We may write a narrative of some 
routine activity and use it as the next chapter of our novel. 
Beginning the day seems to work into the novel more readily 
than other subjects, for I always find among my themes 
scores of papers that carry their characters through the early 
hours. In the two that follow may be noted at least those 
virtues that must now have a familiar sound even to the most 
indifferent ear. What are they? 

The alarm clock was set for seven, and yet at six-thirty Mrs. Maizer 
shot out her thin hand from under the warm covers and pushed the 
alarm trigger from “On” to “Off.” She was getting old and she 
didn’t need so much sleep. Besides too much sleep made you fat, 
like that Mrs. Cohen who lived on the top floor and kept a maid. 

She looked around the room and sighed faintly. She wished that 
Lillie would put her clothes away when she went to bed. But wishing 
never did any good! With one hand she groped about on the floor 
for her felt bedroom slippers while with the other hand she balanced 
herself in the bed. As soon as she had her feet in the slippers, she 
threw off the blankets and scurried into her warm brown kimono. 
Quickly she gathered up and hung away the flimsy pink chiffon dress 
that Lillie had worn the night before. Lillie had left it crumpled up 
over her shoes on a chair. Mrs. Maizer put shoe trees into Lillie’s 
silver kid pumps and dropped into a basin of water the pair of sheer 
stockings that had been rolled into balls and shoved into the toes of 
the slippers. A nudge on Lillie’s shoulder brought a long dreary 
nasal hum, followed by “ Awright, Ma.” 

Ma tiptoed into the kitchen and washed up the telltale remnants 
of a gathering of some of Jack’s friends the night before. There were 
two stacks of plates rimmed with sticky pink and chocolate, with 
the spoons dangling dangerously from them, and a few ash trays 
overflowing with ashes and cigarette stubs. In a few minutes Ma 
was ready to fill the coffee percolator and to set the small kitchen 
table for breakfast. 

The muffled scream of an alarm clock followed by the opening of 
a door told Ma that Jack was up. 

“Say, Ma,” Lillie called, “did you see that pair of stockings I 
washed out yesterday?” 


io6 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


“No.” 

“Oh, Ma, I put them on your dresser.” 

“Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t see them.” 

Now Jack called. “Ma, did my brown suit come back from the 
cleaner’s? ” 

“Yes, it’s in your closet.” 

At eight o’clock she called them into the kitchen. It was warm and 
bright and it smelled of fresh coffee. It was easy to serve Jack; he 
gulped down whatever was given him. But Lillie was a problem. 

“I’m not hungry, Ma. I don’t want any breakfast.” 

“Don’t be foolish, Lillie. You can’t leave the house on an empty 
stomach.” 

“Ma, she’s trying to keep the slim and girlish,” came from Jack. 

“Aw, shut up.” 

Breakfast had begun. . . . Ma rushed back and forth from stove 
to table in order to have the cereal just thick enough, the eggs just 
brown enough, the coffee just hot enough. . . . Breakfast was 
over. 

“’By, Ma.” 

A peck from Lillie, an affectionate hug from Jack, a slam of the 
door, and Ma was alone. 1 

Maria shivered and opened her eyes slowly. She saw the thin 
fingers of grey light coming through the closed shutters and sighed. 
She was sinking back into a mist of sleep when a rooster shattered 
the silence and woke her once more. Gingerly she slipped one foot 
from under the quilt. Brr — it was cold. She could see her breath 
coming in little puffs. Well, she might as well get it over. She slid 
out onto the floor and groped for her slippers with one foot while she 
hastily thrust her arms into her grey wrapper. Her exploring foot 
found the slippers where she had dropped them the night before and 
she slipped into them, one big toe sticking out of a hole. 

Bundling her wrapper around her, she shuffled over to the little 
mirror and knotted her straggly wisps of yellow-white hair in a hard 
knob on the top of her head, viciously jabbing in a solitary hairpin. 
She stopped a moment before the glass. In the feeble light her face 
was a sickly white with a network of wrinkles. Her blue eyes seemed 
to be getting paler; her colorless mouth drooped wearily. There 
were bags under her tired eyes, and a frown drew the whitish eye- 
1 Frances Stavisky. 


NARRATION WITHOUT PLOT 


107 


brows together. And, she told herself, she was not an old woman! 
She turned with a sigh and stumbled listlessly down the dark narrow 
stairs. She pushed open the door at the foot of the stairs, shoving up 
the latch with a clatter. Giving barely a glance to the room with its 
big oilcloth-covered table, piled high with clean dishes — Maria 
didn’t have a china-closet like the Pullens — she moved to the great 
black stove. My, it was getting light quick! She’d have to get a 
move on to get the men’s breakfast before six. 

Snatching a newspaper from the wood-box she crumpled it and 
stuffed it into the stove, lifting the lid noisily. She quickly shoved in 
a few sticks of pitch-pine — they got all their firewood from the ties 
the railroad men gave them — and struck a match with an explo¬ 
sive little crack. She slammed the lid back and got out the big 
frying pan from its place in the oven. She shuffled into the dark cold 
pantry and returned with a bowl of sliced cold potatoes, a bowl filled 
to the top with fragrant yellow butter — yesterday was churning day 
— and a basketful of brown eggs, to some of which little grey feathers 
still clung. The potatoes she dumped into the smoking frying pan, 
and the eggs she cracked into another pan. With a knife from the 
crowded table she chopped and stirred the browning potatoes. 
Quickly she pushed forward a large blue-enameled coffee pot to the 
center of the stove, and soon the smell of strong coffee mingled with 
the brown smell of the frying potatoes. 

Above the sizzling she heard a door slam upstairs. They must be 
getting up. She dumped the potatoes into a big cracked bowl and 
with a broad knife deftly lifted the eggs from the pan to the platter. 
She set these with the coffee on the blue calico hot-plate holders on 
the table. Was everything ready? She could hear their heavy boots 
clumping down the stairs. No, she had forgotten the bread and the 
pot-cheese. She scurried into the pantry, returning with a huge brown 
loaf under one arm and a bowl of creamy white pot-cheese under the 
other. She slammed them on the table and, giving the room one 
quick glance, she stumbled up the stairs to dress . 1 

Points of structure and style. — For this plotless narrative 
that we are writing, the only questions of structure are the 
order in which we shall arrange the details and the importance 
which we shall ascribe to each of them. And, indeed, the order 
1 Alice Raff. 


io8 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


of the details is dictated by their actual sequence in time. As 
for style, the manner of our narrative writing is still the manner 
of our descriptive writing, with particular care to choose verbs 
that are really words of action and to construct sentences that 
preserve the rhythm, slow or fast, of the action. 

Notice, in the following story, the relish with which the 
writer sets down every detail and the short blunt sentence 
structure with which he gives the quick, expert movements of 
the fisherman: 

Rapidly he mixed some buckwheat flour with water and stirred it 
smooth, one cup of flour, one cup of water. He put a handful of 
coffee in the pot and dipped a lump of grease out of a can and slid 
it sputtering across the hot skillet. On the smoking skillet he poured 
smoothly the buckwheat batter. It spread like lava, the grease 
spitting sharply. Around the edges the buckwheat cake began to 
firm, then brown, then crisp. The surface was bubbling slowly to 
porousness. Nick pushed under the browned under-surface with a 
fresh pine chip. He shook the skillet sideways and the cake was loose 
on the surface. I won’t try and flop it, he thought. He slid the chip 
of clean wood all the way under the cake, and flopped it over onto its 
face. It sputtered in the pan. 

When it was cooked Nick regreased the skillet. He used all the 
batter. It made another big flapjack and one smaller one. 

Nick ate a big flapjack and a smaller one, covered with apple 
butter. He put apple butter on the third cake, folded it over twice, 
wrapped it in oiled paper and put it in his shirt pocket. He put the 
apple butter jar back in the pack and cut bread for two sandwiches. 

In the pack he found a big onion. He sliced it in two and peeled 
the silky outer skin. Then he cut one half into slices and made onion 
sandwiches. He wrapped them in oiled paper and buttoned them 
in the other pocket of his khaki shirt. He turned the skillet upside 
down on the grill, drank the coffee, sweetened and yellow brown with 
the condensed milk in it, and tidied up the camp. It was a nice little 
camp. 

Nick took his fly rod out of the leather rod-case, jointed it, and 
shoved the rod-case back into the tent. He put on the reel and 
threaded the line through the guides. He had to hold it from hand to 


NARRATION WITHOUT PLOT 109 

hand, as he threaded it, or it would slip back through its own weight. 
It was a heavy, double tapered fly line. Nick had paid eight dollars 
for it a long time ago. It was heavy to lift back in the air and come 
forward flat and heavy and straight to make it possible to cast a 
fly which has no weight. Nick opened the aluminum leader box. 
The leaders were coiled between the damp flannel pads. Nick had 
wet the pads at the water cooler on the train up to St. Ignace. In 
the damp pads the gut leaders had softened and Nick unrolled one and 
tied it by a loop at the end to the heavy fly line. He fastened a hook 
on the end of the leader. It was a small hook; very thin and springy. 

Nick took it from his hook book, sitting with the rod across his 
lap. He tested the knot and the spring of the rod by pulling the line 
taut. It was a good feeling. He was careful not to let the hook bite 
into his finger. 

He started down to the stream, holding his rod, the bottle of grass¬ 
hoppers hung from his neck by a thong tied in half hitches around the 
neck of the bottle. His landing net hung by a hook from his belt. 
Over his shoulder was a long flour sack tied at each corner into an ear. 
The cord went over his shoulder. The sack flapped against his legs. 

Nick felt awkward and professionally happy with all his equipment 
hanging from him. The grasshopper bottle swung against his chest. 
In his shirt the breast pockets bulged against him with the lunch 
and his fly book. 

He stepped into the stream. It was a shock. His trousers clung 
tight to his legs. His shoes felt the gravel. The water was a rising 
cold shock. 

Rushing, the current sucked against his legs. Where he stepped in, 
the water was over his knees. He waded with the current. The 
gravel slid under his shoes. He looked down at the swirl of water 
below each leg and tipped up the bottle to get a grasshopper. 

The first grasshopper gave a jump in the neck of the bottle and 
went out into the water. He was sucked under in the whirl by 
Nick’s right leg and came to the surface a little way down stream. 
He floated rapidly, kicking. In a quick circle, breaking the smooth 
surface of the water, he disappeared. A trout had taken him. 

Another hopper poked his head out of the bottle. His antennae 
wavered. He was getting his front legs out of the bottle to jump. 
Nick took him by the head and held him while he threaded the slim 
hook under his chin, down through his thorax and into the last seg- 


no 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


ments of his abdomen. The grasshopper took hold of the hook with 
his front feet, spitting tobacco juice on it. Nick dropped him into the 
water. 

Holding the rod in his right hand he let out line against the pull 
of the grasshopper in the current. He stripped off line from the reel 
with his left hand and let it run free. He could see the hopper in the 
little waves of the current. It went out of sight. 

There was a tug on the line. Nick pulled against the taut line. 
It was his first strike. Holding the now living rod against the cur¬ 
rent, he brought in the line with his left hand. The rod bent in jerks, 
the trout pumping against the current. Nick knew it was a small one. 
He lifted the rod straight up in the air. It bowed with the pull. 

He saw the trout in the water jerking with his head and body 
against the shifting tangent of the line in the stream. 

Nick took the line in his left hand and pulled the trout, thumping 
tiredly against the current, to the surface. His back was mottled the 
clear, water-over-gravel color, his side flashing in the sun. The rod 
under his right arm, Nick stooped, dipping his right hand into the 
current. He held the trout, never still, with his moist right hand, 
while he unhooked the barb from his mouth, then dropped him back 
into the stream. 

He hung unsteadily in the current, then settled to the bottom beside 
a stone. Nick reached down his hand to touch him, his arm to the 
elbow under water. The trout was steady in the moving stream, rest¬ 
ing on the gravel, beside a stone. As Nick’s fingers touched him, 
touched his smooth, cool, underwater feeling he was gone, gone in a 
shadow across the bottom of the stream. 

He is all right, Nick thought. He was only tired. ... 1 

1 In Our Time , Ernest Hemingway. Boni and Liveright. 


CHAPTER XIII 


COLLISIONS: NARRATION WITH PLOT 

The source of plot. — “A novel, in which,” wrote Maurice 
Hewlett, “as mostly in life, . . . nothing happens.” Mrs. 
Maizer and Maria get up in the morning, and prepare meals, 
and wash dishes, and go to bed at night. They do this day 
in and day out. In their life, mostly , nothing happens. But 
a morning comes when Lillie has been a little more heedless 
than usual or when Maria’s distaste at what she sees in the 
mirror is a little less to be borne. Perhaps Maria’s sister 
Lizzie, younger by only a few years, comes on a visit from Cali¬ 
fornia, where she moved after her marriage; and Maria sees 
her still young and fresh, while Maria is old and worn-out. 
Lizzie insists that there is still a chance for Maria — if Maria 
will take it. She need not be a drudge forever. She need only 
leave her father and go with her sister. Here are collisions. 
They make us question the reason Hewlett assigns for Jane 
Austen’s plots. Have her novels plots solely because of her 
exacting sense of form? Or have they plots because life, mostly 
without happenings, sometimes does bring heads together in 
collisions? Even in Jane Austen’s quiet backwater, single 
gentlemen of large fortune moved into the neighborhood and 
mammas of marriageable daughters began to scheme and con¬ 
trive. Here are mild shocks, collisions. And Jane Austen, in 
recording the events that sprang from the collisions, was com¬ 
mitted to novels with plots. 

Hewlett’s word collisions is as good a word as any for what 
happens in life that gives plot to literature. For forty years 


hi 


112 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


Mother has wanted a new house, and for forty years Father 
has been building, not the new house, but new barns. Mother 
might go on without the new house for another forty years, were 
it not that Nanny, her daughter, who is about to be married, 
is frail, and that Mother wants her to live on at home where 
Mother can keep the burden of work from the girl’s shoulders. 
Now the old house is wretchedly inadequate; a new house must 
be obtained. And so after all these years of meek submission, 
Mother’s will clashes with Father’s; and “The Revolt of 
Mother” 1 has plot. 

Struggle between one person and another. — Plot often comes 
through this collision between people — husband and wife, 
parents and children, neighbors, classmates. An old man who 
knows that he will be unbearably bored by inaction may be 
pressed by his children to retire from business and “enjoy” life. 
A mother who has always managed her home may feel herself 
supplanted by the daughter-in-law who is trying to spare the 
older woman the care of the house. Children may think that 
they are entitled to more freedom than their parents are willing 
to allow them. Parents may think themselves neglected by 
children whose interests draw them away from the home. A 
man may succeed in business and now be ambitious to live in 
a circle and on a scale which his wife finds formidable, terrifying. 
A woman may be envious of neighbors who spend more than 
she does and may attempt to drive her cautious husband into 
expenditures that he cannot afford. Husband and wife may 
differ about the education of their children, about their religious 
training. A woman may want to adopt a child; her husband, 
her mother, may oppose her wish. 

The collision may be over less important matters. A daughter 
may tease her parents to refurnish the home in the current 

1 A New England Nun and Other Stories , Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. 
Harper. 


NARRATION WITH PLOT 


113 

fashion, or to move into a more pretentious neighborhood. A 
wife may have upon her hands the training of a husband who 
is affronted when she insists upon a definite and regular allow¬ 
ance, a budget for the home; or a husband who thinks it be¬ 
neath his dignity to assist in any way in the work of the home. 
A husband or a small boy may want to own a dog; a wife, a 
mother, an aunt, or a grandmother may most decidedly not 
want a dog about the house. 

Struggle between a person and impersonal forces.—But the 
collision is not always between people. A man may knock his 
head against the universe and see stars. It may be that it is 
not the will of another human being that thwarts him, but an 
environment from which he tries to escape, circumstances that 
hedge him in. He may pit his strength against public opinion, 
a political machine, the prevailing attitude toward religion. 
Here, too, the conflict may be over important or unimportant 
matters: it may involve the fate of a community or the happi¬ 
ness of a small boy for a day. It may be caused by a man’s 
defiance of the social system or a boy’s desire to stand well 
with his fellows. 

Struggle within a person. — Or the struggle may be waged 
between the warring impulses and standards of conduct within 
a man’s own mind. A man can write what he considers good 
poetry, or paint good pictures, or compose good music. This 
the public will have none of, but it shows itself eager for the 
sort of thing that he considers insincere, inartistic, vulgar. 
Perhaps he has a family to support. A chemist has the choice 
of going into the employ of a commercial house at a princely 
salary or going on with his work in the research laboratory of 
his college at a starvation wage. A college athlete on whom 
hangs the fate of his college in a coming contest can remain on 
the team only if he passes his history test, and can pass his his¬ 
tory test only if he cheats. A girl must decide between accept- 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


114 

ing a traveling fellowship for which she has been working during 
her entire college course and staying at home to keep within her 
influence a brother who is being antagonized by a well-meaning 
but inept father. A woman may realize her cherished dream 
of going to the city and preparing herself to be a nurse, only 
if she permits her young sister to forego the love that has just 
come to her; for one of the two must stay with their invalid 
mother. A boy wavers between his longing to escape the ordeal 
of reciting before the assembled school and his horror of being 
a quitter. A girl is torn between her desire to show her affection 
for people and her ingrained reserve that will not let her speak 
out. 

Out of these collisions grow stories with plot. And these 
collisions are occurring around us all the time. Can any one 
have read the possibilities of conflict that we have just enu¬ 
merated without recalling many similar instances from his own 
experience or from his knowledge of the life of his family and 
his circle of friends? These are the material of our next ad¬ 
venture in writing. 

And here it will be necessary to relinquish — reluctantly, I 
hope — the novel that we have been working with for the past 
few months. For if we were to attempt to write out a struggle 
on the scale of a novel, it would take a much longer time than 
the weeks that remain of our course together. Students, it is 
true, do occasionally complete novels that they began in college 
courses, and occasionally these novels reach a much larger 
public than the college theme reader and the students’ class¬ 
mates. These, however, usually ripen during the long leisure of 
summer vacations. Certainly they cannot be prescribed gener¬ 
ally for any group of student writers during the crowded months 
of the college term. Accordingly we turn now from the large 
spaces of the novel to the abbreviated confines of the short 
story. 


NARRATION WITH PLOT 


115 

The choice of short story material. — The first step for us to 
take is to decide upon the material that we shall use. From our 
own experience or from the life that goes on about us we choose 
a conflict that has in some way won our interest and that now 
stands out in our mind. It may come from recollections of a 
fairly remote childhood in school or at home; from memories 
of more recent days in high school; from impressions of our 
college life. The struggle may be between one person and an¬ 
other, or between a person and impersonal forces, or between 
divergent tendencies within the person himself. The people 
involved in the struggle must be, as we are now all surely aware, 
people of the sort with whom we have grown up, whom we meet 
day after day, whom we know almost as well as we know our¬ 
selves. Their social environment must be one with which we 
are thoroughly familiar. The town, the city, or the country¬ 
side in which they live must be one that belongs to us by reason 
of our close acquaintance with it. The incidents that happen 
in the course of the story must not outrage our sense of what 
might be expected to happen to such people in such an en¬ 
vironment. 

The limitation in time. — In addition to these limitations — 
limitations within which we have been writing all along — 
there is an additional limitation imposed upon us by the brevity 
of the short story. If we have in mind a course of events that 
stretches out over a long period of years, it probably will not 
serve us as material for a short story. Certainly we cannot 
tell it in its entirety, beginning at the beginning, unfolding it 
gradually, producing convincingly an impression of the lapse of 
time, continuing to the end. This is the province of the novel: 
it does not belong within the narrow boundaries of the short 
story. For the short story we may single out from this long 
series one brief section that will serve as an illuminating con¬ 
densation of the whole. We may throw the light of our nar- 


n6 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


ration on just that fragment of life that encloses the culmination 
of a conflict of long duration. We may even limit our selection 
to one day only, if we wish. What we may not do is to let it 
spread over a long interval. 

Preliminary statement of struggle. — This material that we 
have decided upon we had better put into the form of a written 
statement and bring to class for general discussion. Often 
even a tenuous idea for a story gains definiteness and solidity 
through question and comment. Since we are committed to 
struggle as plot, let us word our plot in terms of struggle. Baldly, 
this would resolve itself into the formula: The struggle in my 
story is between A and B. In the end B triumphs. 

Our statement, however, should be much more than a bald 
formula. A and B should carry, from the very beginning, names 
such as they bear in life. The actual names of the actual people 
we may not use. We may, however, choose names that suggest 
the real ones. In our set, it may be, a certain sort of name is 
usually not given. Perhaps Rosabelle, Arlene, Ethelbert, and 
Percival are names that are unthinkable in our circle. These 
are not, then, the names that we should choose for our acquaint¬ 
ances in the story that we write about them. Particularly is 
this true of surnames that reflect race. A story about a conflict 
between parents who had selected a prospective husband for 
their daughter and the daughter who rebelled against their 
dictation, although it had the support of the social sanction of 
the circle in which they moved, seemed incredible when the 
characters bore such names as Leigh and Overton but won 
belief as soon as the student writer admitted that in life the 
family names indicated a Middle-European origin. Another 
student, with a story about a struggle in the mind of a son 
between his desire to go to see his old mother before she died 
and his fear lest he be seized for military service, convinced her 
class audience only when she consented to change the English- 


NARRATION WITH PLOT 117 

sounding names of her choice to the Italian names that gave the 
story the foundation it needed. 

Our statement, definite now in the names of its characters, 
must be equally explicit in setting down the conflict. The bare 
statement, “The struggle is between Abigail Bennet and her 
husband Jonathan/’ tells nothing. Our critics need fully as 
much information as is given in “The struggle is between Jona¬ 
than Bennet’s habit of meddling in the affairs of his wife and 
daughter, innocent enough in its motive but sometimes dis¬ 
astrous in its consequences, and the suddenly awakened deter¬ 
mination of his wife Abigail that for one day he shall not interfere, 
especially as his meddling may come between their daughter 
Clary and Ballard, the young man to whom she is engaged.” 
Nor is it sufficient to conclude: “Abigail succeeds.” If com¬ 
ment on the story is to be helpful, the statement must be at 
least as detailed as “Abigail, although habitually a woman of 
unswerving truthfulness, lies desperately, repeatedly, and con¬ 
vincingly in answer to her husband’s questions and suggestions 
and thus saves the day for Clary, and herself derives a half- 
defiant satisfaction from her ‘day off.’ ” 1 

1 “A Day Off,” in A County Road , Alice Brown. 


CHAPTER XIV 

PATTERN: THE DRAMATIC TYPE OF PLOT 

Thus far we have clung pretty closely to life, and even what 
we are now about to attempt does not depart very far from it. 
Any art develops certain patterns, more or less set. Music has 
its patterns for sonata and symphony. Architecture builds 
from patterns capable of infinite variation but reducible to 
well-defined styles. Poetry has a rigid pattern for a sonnet and 
a flexible pattern for an ode. Drama has a pattern, and it is 
this pattern that the short story based on conflict has taken for 
its own. 

The triangle of dramatic structure. — You will probably 
remember from your high school studies in the plays of Shake¬ 
speare that the pattern of the drama has been traced as a 
triangle. To the level line of life malice or ambition or envy 
or hatred applies a force. j The opposing 

force, although resisting | this intrusion, 

is less powerful and cannot preserve the line of life on its 
accustomed level but must suffer it to be driven in the direc¬ 
tion in which the hostile force is pushing. ^ 

A moment comes when it seems as though 
A were invincible and B utterly defeated. ^ 

The experience of mankind, however, | 
crystallized in proverb, reminds us that it is always darkest 
before dawn; that when the tale of bricks is heaviest, then 
comes Moses. In accordance with the wisdom of our com¬ 
mon experience, then, B is vouchsafed strength; A weakens. 

118 





DRAMATIC PLOT 


119 



forced toward the goal of B’s desire. 
The strife and the story end with B’s 
triumph. That all human experience 
follows this norm, no one, of course, 
can maintain; but it is sufficiently the 
common lot to make it not too artificial a pattern even for those 
who believe that all patterns in art should grow from within 
and not be imposed arbitrarily from without upon it. 

Let us take a story in which the pattern is clearly defined. 
Let us name accurately the two forces that are struggling to¬ 
gether. Let us look to the end to see which force triumphs 
ultimately. Let us trace the story backwards until we find the 
moment in the latter part of it when this force began to show 
that it was not completely beaten. Let us do the same for the 
force that seemed triumphant during the first part of the story: 
let us find the moment of its greatest apparent triumph and 
also the moment when the action began in the first evidence of 
conflict between the two forces. 

Structural points of the short story. — It is inconvenient, 
when we are discussing these moments in the structure of the 
story, to use long explanatory phrases to designate them. A 
terminology has, accordingly, developed. The nomenclature 
which I consider simplest and most logical uses the term initial 
incident for the first moment when the reader is conscious of a 
struggle. This point comes, of course, at the beginning or very 
near the beginning of so short a narrative as the short story. 
From this moment the action rises, in a series of events to which 
is given the self-explanatory name rising action , to the point 
where the force that has been stronger throughout this rising 
action seems invincible. This moment is called the climax. 
Notice that, although this term is frequently used in other con¬ 
nections, we are employing it as a technical term and are giving 
it a meaning that arises solely from the structure of the story as 



120 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


the product of the conflict of two forces. It is possible that 
this structural climax of the story may be the emotional climax 
as well, the highest point of interest and emotional stress in the 
story; but this is not inevitable. 

After the climax there is a moment of hesitation during which 
the crest of the wave of action seems to hang suspended, wavering. 
But although it looks as though it might sweep forward resist- 
lessly and bear with it the force now uppermost, we experienced 
readers are not entirely deceived. There have been indications 
— and we have recognized them — that the force apparently 
defeated will come into its own. Immediately upon the climax, 
then, follows [the moment when we are certain of this, the 
moment that is called the turning-point. This turns the story 
securely downward through the falling action to its goal, the 
victory of the force that has been gaining during this latter 
part of the action. This moment is known technically as the 
catastrophe — even if it gives the story a happy ending. I 
mention this because of an experience I once had with a group 
of students. I was overwhelmed by the prevailingly tragic 
tone of the stories as, one after the other, they were brought 
before the class for comment. I protested that life was really 
not invariably gloomy, only to be told, in an indignant chorus, 
that the class was of this opinion, too, but that since I had asked 
for catastrophes — ! 

These terms we shall use in our analysis of “Ranny Discovers 
America.” After we have discussed in class our analysis of 
this story, we shall apply the same method to any three stories 
in the list given below; or to any one of these stories and two 
stories selected from a volume of contemporary stories by one 
author; or to one of the first group, one of the second, and a 
story from a current magazine. For this first exercise it will be 
well to avoid stories that are complicated in structure and to 
work only with those that show clearly the pattern on which they 
are arranged. 


DRAMATIC PLOT 


121 


Analyzing the short story. — In writing down our analyses, 
moreover, we must be careful to keep everything in terms of 
structure. All the stories of our selection will surely not be 
known to all the other members of our group; and if they are 
to follow us with understanding and interest, our analyses must 
justify themselves — must “prove” — as they proceed. Before 
we bring them to the attention of the class, therefore, we should 
test them to see whether they set forth the structure unmis¬ 
takably. Does our statement of each point of structure bring 
into play both forces and show their effect on each other? Have 
we made the relation of turning-point to catastrophe the same 
as the relation of initial incident to climax? Given the turning- 
point as we have stated it, is it possible for the class to recon¬ 
struct the movement of the forces throughout the story? Can 
the movement of the forces be plotted correctly from our 
statement of any one of the other points of structure? 

The following stories have been chosen for analysis because 
they follow the story pattern simply and clearly. In some of 
them, it had better be said, the falling action is much shorter 
than the rising action. Indeed, the falling action in the short 
story is often so short as to be precipitous. This need not, 
however, puzzle the student who now has an eye solely for the 
logic of structure and who is not to be misled by any other 
consideration. The short story often has symmetry, but it 
need not be the symmetry of a falling action equal in length to 
the rising action. Why this is not frequently found is obvious, 
once the reader rounds the turning-point, his mind races 
ahead, and the pace of the story dare not be so slow as to lose 
his interest. 

The stories for analysis, then, are Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s 
“ Revolt of ‘ Mother (in A New England Nun ), Alice Brown’s 
“A Day Off” (A Country Road), Hamlin Garland’s “A Day’s 
Pleasure ” (Main Travelled Roads), Elizabeth Stewart Cutting’s 


122 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


“The Blossoming Rod” ( Refractory Husbands), Howard Bru¬ 
baker’s “Breaking Out of Society” ( Ranny ), and Thyra Samter 
Winslow’s “City Folks” ( Picture Frames). 

The short story is so popular a form to-day that it is scarcely 
necessary to compile an exhaustive — and exhausting — list of 
authors. In the short list just given, writers predominate who 
have made themselves familiar with some province of the 
American countryside from the farms of New England to the 
prairies of the Middle West. Students who wish to see how 
material of this sort has been handled may go not only to 
Alice Brown, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Hamlin Garland, 
but also to Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Margaret Deland, 
Norman Duncan, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and Margaret Lynn. 
City streets are the background in most of the stories of Edna 
Ferber and Fanny Hurst. Society of many different degrees 
and kinds of sophistication furnishes characters and settings 
for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Katherine Fullerton Gerould, Katherine 
Mansfield, Leonard Merrick, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, and 
Edith Wharton. A simpler life of suburban homes and small 
communities is drawn in Elizabeth Stewart Cutting’s collections, 
in Inez Haynes Gilmore’s Phoebe and Ernest stories, and in 
some of the stories of Kathleen Norris. Writers who intend to 
make children their principal characters will probably wish to 
make the acquaintance of Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon’s 
Philip and others, J. J. Bell’s little Scotch boy, Howard Bru¬ 
baker’s Ranny, Kenneth Grahame’s imaginative English young¬ 
sters, Elizabeth Jordan’s convent school girls, George Madden 
Martin’s Emmy Lou, and Booth Tarkington’s Penrod. 

These authors, and many others, prospective writers of the 
short story will explore for themselves. They will range the 
pages of the current magazines from A for Atlantic Monthly 
to S for Saturday Evening Post — and farther. Some maga¬ 
zines, notably the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's, offer special 


DRAMATIC PLOT 


123 


rates for students. Here, as in their earlier reading, the first 
question they should ask about any story is, in the words of 
Henry James, “Is it ‘a personal, a direct impression of life? 
Has it the note, the accent of reality?” If it has not this but 
is a fairy-tale for grown-up children, it need be none the worse 
for that, although it is not to our purpose now, provided always 
that it does not sail under false colors, pretending to be a true 
account of life. 

Statement of the structural points of our story. — After we 
have discussed in class as many analyses as we seem to need, 
both to confirm and deepen our impression of the structure of 
the short story and also to recall to our mind by association a 
wealth of detail from our own experience of life that we might 
not otherwise have brought to bear upon our own short stories, 
let us proceed to elaborate our statement of the central struggle 
of our story into a more detailed statement of its structural 
points. Again we must test our structure by asking ourselves 
whether the train of events begun with the initial incident 
reaches its logical height at the climax and whether the direc¬ 
tion given it at the turning-point is continued consistently to 
the catastrophe. Our statement should be sufficiently detailed 
to enable the class to follow the story. Perhaps the following 
statement will show about how much is necessary: 

In the initial incident, Sylvia and Charlotte, the twins, come upon 
a* theme which their older sister Molly, a senior in high school, has 
written about them. Each finds something about her character or 
her habits which she hotly resents. Above all, the twins hate to be 
coupled as they are in the theme, because in real life every one takes 
one for the other. Molly only laughs and will not take the ‘ children 
seriously. 

The action rises through scenes in which the twins rummage 
through Molly’s desk and find a description in which they are again 
coupled and an outline for a rather uncomplimentary story about 
them. Molly, angry at their invasion of her desk, threatens reprisals. 


124 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


The climax is reached when, after a trying day in high school, dar¬ 
ing which they have been several times mistaken for each other, the 
high school Banner is found to have a humorous article treating the 
hated subject as though it were a joke. They decide to make things 
very uncomfortable for Molly, even to the extent of not inviting her 
to their class dance, although they belong to “sister” classes. Molly 
is amazed and hurt that they should carry their resentment as far as 
this, and declares that she will not have anything to do with them. 

The turning-point is reached at the dance. The boy who is most 
popular in the high school, the football hero whom they have been 
longing to know, singles them out and asks to be introduced to them. 
He tells them that he is in Molly’s English class and that he wants 
to know them because of the entertaining things that Molly has 
written about them. Through her realistic descriptions, moreover, 
he has no difficulty in telling them apart. 

During the falling action they make attempts at a reconciliation 
with Molly, and the catastrophe comes when they persuade her to 
write something more about them. 

It is evident that the twins rather than Molly will be the 
center of this story. This is a point that should be clear, even 
in these preliminary statements. We must ask ourselves, there¬ 
fore: “ Which of the two forces in our story is to receive the 
emphasis? Whose story is it? Is our attention to be focused 
on Mother or on Father, Abigail or Jonathan, Molly or the 
twins? ” 


Ranny Discovers America 1 
By Howard Brubaker 

On a Thursday afternoon late in May the United States 
government, which had hovered vaguely over Ranny’s horizon 
for eight-going-on-nine years, came down and began to dabble 
in his personal affairs. This was amazing conduct on the part 
of a government which was something like a flag and the Fourth 

1 Ranny , Howard Brubaker. Harper. 


DRAMATIC PLOT 


125 


of July, and which the teacher talked about on Washington’s 
birthday. Strangest of all, this majestic government revealed 
itself through the trifling person of Bud Hicks, a contemporary 
of Ranny’s, who lived right there in Lakeville and who was a 
notoriously poor speller. 

Ranny and Bud were coming home from school together, but 
because the grass was so warm and green and inviting they 
were not making rapid progress. 

Bud, in the act of inverting himself and standing on his 
hands, dropped some valuables out of his coat pocket — a 
piece of shoemaker’s wax, two moss-agates, and a letter. Be¬ 
fore Bud could get back into the position intended by nature 
Ranny had seized upon the letter. It was duly stamped, 
canceled, and postmarked, and was addressed, miraculously, 
to Mr. Raymond Hicks—“Raymond” being the stylish name 
by which Bud was known to his mother and teacher. 

“ Gimme my letter,” Bud commanded as he gathered up his 
other treasures. 

“ Where’d you get it? ” asked Ranny, complying. 

“In the post-office.” 

“ Yes , you did,” Ranny said. 

“I bet you a thousand dollars!” exclaimed Bud, adding, 
without waiting for his offer to be accepted: “I answered a ad. 
in a magazine. If you get five ’scriptions you get a air-gun.” 
In proof of his statement Bud displayed a lifelike portrait of 
the weapon. “Le’s go an’ see if they is any more mail.” 

Ranny, deeply impressed, assented. He had often gone to 
the post-office on pleasant Sunday mornings with father, but 
he had never before thought of the institution as having any 
direct interest to boys. 

“Who owns the post-office? ” he asked, as they started away. 

“Nobody don’t own it, you crazy,” Bud replied, scornfully. 
“It belongs to the gov’ment.” 


126 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


“You mean the government” said Ranny, glad to find a rift 
in Bud’s armor. Just the same, he felt a respect for Bud Hicks 
which he would never before have believed possible. Bud, 
though still of tender years, had a letter from the government’s 
post-office; it had his name on it, and a stamp with George 
Washington’s picture. It seemed to Ranny that in some mys¬ 
terious way this short, curly-haired boy had joined the United 
States, while he, Randolph Harrington Dukes, was still, as the 
teacher had said on the day he spelled the great President’s 
name “Lincon,” a kind of foreigner. 

There was no mail for either of them at the post-office, and 
the man in the window winked annoyingly over their heads at 
an adult who stood behind them; but one very important 
thing happened. In the post-office they met Tom Rucker, who 
displayed a letter alleged to be from a cousin in Manchester. 
So it seemed that Tom, also, was on speaking-terms with the 
government. Ranny began to wonder how far this thing had 
gone. 

“Does everybody get letters in the post-office?” he asked as 
he and his companion were setting out for home. 

“Sure they do,” Bud replied. “Except Chinymen; they 
can’t read.” This last remark was suggested by the sight of 
the Chinese laundry which they were passing. 

“Chinymen eats rats,” said Ranny, and by a mutual impulse 
they slipped around to the side-window of the laundry and 
peeked in, as they had often done before, half hoping, half fear¬ 
ing that they might find the Chinaman preparing his favorite 
dish. When the laundryman caught sight of them they ran 
very fast, because it is a well-known fact that Chinamen cut off 
boys’ ears. 

But though post-offices, governments, and Chinamen were 
for the time forgotten in the joy of stealing a ride on the back 
of Alleston’s delivery-wagon and the rapture of being chased off, 


DRAMATIC PLOT 


127 


these matters weighed heavily on Ranny’s mind when he reached 
home. He had an impulse to ask mother a few questions, but 
she seemed to be too busy with the baby and the supper to give 
out information upon affairs of state. By six-o’clock-whistle 
time, when, with face and hands washed and hair pasted down, 
he sat on the front porch waiting for father to come home from 
the shop, he had firmly resolved that by some means he must 
have a letter from the post-office and get in touch with the 
government. He would speak to father without delay. Father 
knew all about the government; Ranny had heard him tell Mr. 
Jennings that the government had fallen into the hands of “the 
interests.” 

So absorbed was Ranny with his new idea, that, before he 
knew it, father, pretending not to know it was the right house, 
had walked past the gate and had to be scampered after and 
brought back. As Ranny held fast to father’s hard, knotty 
hand and tried to match his long-legged strides, he realized that 
the present was no time for questions, because when mother 
with a white apron on is in the doorway waiting to be kissed, 
father’s conversation is apt to be sketchy and unsatisfactory. 

Not until supper was over, and father in his rocking-chair on 
the front porch had begun to hold the evening paper close to 
his eyes in the thickening dusk, did Ranny feel that the time 
was ripe to put his new idea into words. He was seated on the 
floor by the step where he could reach over at any time and pull 
father’s trouser leg for dramatic emphasis. 

“Bud Hicks got a letter,” he said by way of opening the 
conversation with a bang. 

Father grunted in that annoying way adults have of answering 
without paying attention. 

“It’s about a air-gun,” Ranny continued. 

That weapon brought father’s paper down at once. 

“No air-guns, Ranny,” he said; “they’re dangerous. I’ll 


128 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


make you a gun out of a broomstick.” Thereupon he closed 
the interview by raising the paper again. 

Ranny, seeing that the conversation had gone astray, made 
a desperate effort to recover it. 

“Father,” he said, with a tug at the “emphasizer,” “I wish 
I — ” 

“Randolph!” 

Father seldom resorted to the stern form of the name, and, 
now that he did, the boy stood unjustly convicted of the high 
crime of teasing. Apparently this was one of those problems 
that had to be worked out without the aid of parents. 

Remembering Bud’s route to citizenship, Ranny went into 
the sitting-room to see if there was some magazine that would 
be of help. But the only periodical which the Dukes’ home 
contained, upon examination, was The Wagon-Maker, a publi¬ 
cation which father seemed to find interesting, but which offered 
no aid in the present crisis. True, it contained an advertise¬ 
ment of real estate near Long Island Sound, but a haziness 
upon the meaning of real estate made it seem best not to “write 
for particulars.” Better abandon the magazine idea entirely, 
he thought, than to run the risk of landing himself, and perhaps 
father and mother and the baby, in prison. 

In the quiet darkness of his room that night Ranny tossed 
to and fro on an uneasy bed, wide-eyed, gazing on the goal of his 
desire. He could think of no cousins in Manchester or elsewhere 
who would send letters to him; it would be years before the 
baby would be of letter-writing age. Sleep put an end to these 
reflections, but day streaming through his window brought an 
inspiration. At the noon hour he hastened to Bud Hicks for 
co-operation. 

“I tell you what le’s do,” he said. “You write a letter to 
me and I’ll write a letter to you. We’ll mail ’em in the post- 
office.” 


DRAMATIC PLOT 


129 


“I ain’t got no money,” Bud replied. 

“ I could get four cents, easy,” Ranny said, boastfully. 

However, Bud, clinging to his monopoly, refused to have a 
part in any such plan. 

“They wouldn’t be reg’lar letters,” he said, fondling his own 
grimy and desirable envelope. 

“Aw,” said Ranny, “you think you’re smart with your 
dirty old letter.” The interview degenerated into an exchange 
of sticks and small stones as they went their separate ways. 

In his search for another correspondent that afternoon Ranny 
met with nothing but discouragement and ridicule. “Fatty” 
Hartman, who sat across the aisle, was not interested in his 
government at all. 

“You could tell it to me,” he said, inanely, in reply to the 
proposal. “ Why should you write me a letter? ” 

At recess-time “Fatty” told the joke to Bud Hicks, who 
repeated it to most of the other boys in the class amid wide¬ 
spread snickering. 

“He’s only trying to copy after me,” said Bud, displaying 
his own poor apology for a letter. 

Tom Rucker, whose humor always took a practical turn, 
increased the general hilarity by pouring water down Ranny’s 
neck. After school there were further persecutions. Bud, 
suddenly remembering the conversation of the previous day, 
advanced the theory that Ranny was a Chinaman. The other 
boys adopted it gleefully, and the crowd that was gathered 
about a marble game in the open space back of the Methodist 
church greeted him as “pigtail.” As Ranny slipped away he 
heard one boy call out, “He’s goin’ home to eat rats.” 

That night after supper Ranny sat on the front step in deep 
despondency. He seemed further from his patriotic goal than 
ever; there was not a boy in the class who would write him a 
letter now. Mother came out of the house and with a sigh of 


130 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


relief sank to the step by his side and laid a tired hand upon his 
own. Putting away the paper and lighting a cigar, father be¬ 
came human and jovial. An electric light on the corner came 
to life with a hiss, and mother pointed out how beautifully it 
glowed through the green of the new leaves. A young girl 
chattered somewhere in the shadows, just as girls do on the 
way home from school. 

Suddenly a desperate thought came to Ranny. Why not 
exchange letters with a girl? Of course he would not dare to 
show the contents of the envelope to anybody, but surely it 
would be better to have a letter from a girl than never to get 
into government circles at all. 

The next day Ranny took the matter up with Josie Kendal, 
who sat in front of him. Except when he pulled her hair, Josie 
always listened to him and laughed at his jokes. Josie’s writing 
was queer and she probably cared nothing about the govern¬ 
ment, but the time for being particular had passed. 

“Say, Josie,” he whispered, “if I write you a letter, will you 
write me a letter? ” 

Josie giggled, but did not commit herself. 

“I mean reg’lar letters in the post-office,” Ranny went on, 
“with stamps an’ everything.” 

Josie turned around and looked at Ranny with serious in¬ 
quiry in her blue eyes. “What should I write to you, Ranny?” 
she asked. 

“Josie, turn around, please!” Miss Mills said, sharply, to 
the great amusement of “Fatty” Hartman. 

“I’ll write you a letter,” Ranny whispered when conversation 
seemed safe once more, “and you can answer it.” 

Josie bobbed her pigtails in assent. 

Ranny hurried home that afternoon so fast that when he 
arrived there mother said, “My gracious!” and looked at the 
clock. 


DRAMATIC PLOT 


13 1 

“Mother,” said Ranny, “I wish you’d give me two cents.” 

“What do you want it for?” mother asked. 

“Oh, somethin’,” Ranny replied, fumbling with a button on 
his coat. 

After searching through some coins in a baking-powder can, 
mother produced the required amount. Putting the pennies 
in his pocket, Ranny went to the writing-desk in the sitting- 
room and got an envelope, a tablet, and a pencil. At last he 
stood face to face with the problem that had been giving him 
trouble all day. What should he write to Josie? None of the 
usual remarks about “Fatty” Hartman’s fatness or the teacher’s 
crossness or Josie’s pigtails and freckles seemed suited to the 
demands of that great mysterious government. But as he 
stood reflectively chewing his pencil, suddenly the whole diffi¬ 
culty was cleared away. On a shelf in the combination book¬ 
case-desk, between The Story of Man and The Treasury of 
Golden Thoughts , was a volume that showed you how to do 
everything properly. In this hitherto useless book were letters 
already written out; Ranny had only to copy one, sign his name 
to it, and mail it to Josie. To avoid questions he withdrew with 
his task to the “secret den,” which parents and other ill-informed 
adults spoke of as the woodshed. 

This structure, which adjoined the kitchen, did, as a matter 
of fact, contain wood, also a tool-bench, a discarded bedstead, 
and the remains of a clock. In one corner there was a small 
inclosure constructed of boxes by father’s help, and devoted to 
Ranny’s own purposes. Sometimes it was a robber’s cave, 
sometimes a drug-store, and it was always a picture-gallery 
for color work of a humorous nature. To-day it looked like 
one of those advertisements which invite you to “study draw¬ 
ing at home”; for Ranny had hit upon a fine device. One 
letter in the book was printed in script, and Ranny was tracing 
it with a lead-pencil over a carbon paper that had come with 


13 2 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


his Christmas drawing set. The result revealed Ranny as a 
flawless penman and an inveterate letter-writer except for 
the signature and the address on the envelope. He would try 
to get down to the post-office and mail the letter at noon the 
next day; for the evening he had nothing to do except to reach 
into his pocket from time to time to see that the letter was safe. 

The next forenoon, just by way of assuring Josie that 
everything was going along without a hitch, he poked her 
respectfully in the back and gave her a glimpse of the envelope, 
concealed from the public gaze by the covers of his geography. 
Josie giggled gratifyingly and put back her hand. 

“Let me look at it,” she whispered. 

Ranny started to comply, keeping his eye on the teacher, 
but at this moment Bud Hicks, who was evidently watching the 
proceedings, gave an appreciative cough. The teacher’s eye 
swept over the room. Josie, alarmed, withdrew her hand, and 
the letter fell into the aisle. Ranny dropped back into the 
position of one deeply concerned about the Orinoco River, but 
the teacher was beside his desk in an instant, asking him to 
pick up the letter. 

“Did you write that, Randolph?” Miss Mills asked, noting 
the address. 

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, with a sinking heart. 

“Did you write to him first, Josie?” 

Josie’s braids bobbed emphatic denial, and she looked at 
Ranny as though she had never before noticed that he sat 
behind her. 

Ranny had a fleeting fear that Miss Mills was going to open 
the letter; a moment later he was sorry she had not. It is 
doubtful if anybody but a teacher could have thought of the 
scheme that she immediately unfolded. 

“Miss Kendal,” she said, with an ironical bow, “this is your 
letter. Please open it and copy it in full on the blackboard. 


DRAMATIC PLOT 


133 

The gentleman who thinks this is a post-office will kindly stay 
after school and learn better.” 

Ranny heard a muffled snicker back of him somewhere and 
felt his ears growing hot. He had a sensation as of eyes sticking 
into him from all directions, and he knew that to meet “Fatty” 
Hartman’s gaze would be disastrous. He wished he was out 
in the open air; he wished he had a drink of water. 

Finally Josie finished her task and was allowed to take her 
seat. Ranny had a new sinking of the heart when he realized 
how his work had suffered from Josie’s ruinous scrawl. Miss 
Mills, who had been busy suppressing outbreaks of lawlessness, 
now read the message over, wrinkling up her brows in perplexity. 
The letter was as follows: 

Dear Sir: — Your esteemed favor of the seventh inst. at hand, 
and in reply will state that we have this day forwarded to your 
address the following mdse., for which we hand you invoices herewith, 
subject to 5% 10 days, or 4% 30 days. 

9 bbls. flour No. 7B, 

18 cwt. lime, 

1 hgsd. Orleans molasses, 

100 lbs. leaf lard. 

Thanking you for your valued order and anticipating a continuance 
of your patronage, we beg to remain, 

Yours very respectfully, 
Randolph Harrington Dukes. 

Upon reading this letter Miss Mills was seized with a violent 
fit of coughing and had to take refuge in a handkerchief and 
a glass of water. To Ranny this was a welcome reprieve, as 
though he had arrived at the dentist’s and found him occupied 
with another patient. 

“You may give me that letter, Josie,” she said at last. “The 
children will please remember that this is not the place” — 
another cough — “for business transactions. The class in 
geography! ” 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


134 

That ordeal over, Ranny began to hope that the interview 
at noon mi ght also pass without physical violence. At any 
rate, he thought, as the other pupils filed out with grins in his 
direction, he would escape the scoffing public opinion in the 
street below. 

Miss Mills’s first question as she leaned against “Fatty” 
Hartman’s desk and looked down upon Ranny with searching, 
puzzled eyes, was reassuring. 

“Where did you write this letter, Ranny?” 

“At home.” 

“But this isn’t your handwriting,” she exclaimed, as she 
looked at the contents of the envelope for the first time. 

Ranny enlightened her as to the carbon-paper device. 

“And you brought it to school to give it to Josie? ” 

“I was going to take it to the post-office,” he explained, 
laboriously producing two cents as proof. Even now, in one of 
life’s crises, he found himself wondering whether it wouldn’t 
be well to spend the money for all-day-suckers. 

“Ranny,” said the teacher, “you are telling me the truth 
I know; but why did you want to write to Josie? Is she —” 

Ranny recognized the silly adult idea from afar and forestalled 
it. 

“I want to get a letter from the post-office, and Josie said 
she would answer,” he said, earnestly. “I want to belong to 
the gover’ment like Washington an’ Lincoln. I never get any 
letters. You said I was a foreigner, an’ the boys call me Chiny- 
man an’ everything.” 

The teacher seemed at last to understand. She dismissed 
Ranny with the confusing impression that he had not done 
anything wrong, but that he mustn’t do it again. Just as he 
was leaving the room he looked back, and there was Miss Mills 
at her desk, her face very serious as she gazed thoughtfully at 
the window. 


DRAMATIC PLOT 


135 


This scene was but the foretaste of a long, hard, painful 
afternoon. “Fatty” Hartman, whenever the teacher’s back 
was turned, made violent motions, as of one writing letters. 
Once Bud Hicks succeeded in catching his eye with a libelous 
caricature on his slate, labeled, “Ranny and Josie.” That 
young person was scornful; to a friendly tug on her hair 
she responded by elevating her nose and pulling her braids 
over her shoulder to safety, indicating to a gleeful world that 
her latch-string was no longer out to Randolph Harrington 
Dukes. The long school-day expired in gloom. He had tried 
everything and failed. He might have been a Spaniard, for all 
the good the United States was to him. 

Leaving the other boys at the school-yard gate, Ranny set 
off for home through Carrington’s alley. But his tormentors 
were not to be evaded so easily. 

“Hey, Bob, there goes your girl,” he heard Bud call out. 
Bud, followed by a number of trouble-seekers, caught up with 
Ranny at the intersection of the two alleys. Ranny, clenching 
his fists, turned and faced his enemy. 

“Aw, let me alone,” he said. “What’s the matter with you? ” 

Bud, encouraged by the shouts of the boys behind him, 
ignored Ranny’s threatening attitude, and crowded up close. 
“Pig-tail Chinyman!” he said, tauntingly. 

Nobody was more surprised at what followed than Ranny 
himself; his fist flew out and landed solidly on Bud’s chin. As 
if encouraged by its partner’s success, the other fist traveled 
straight to Bud’s stomach. In the next instant Ranny found 
himself lying flat upon his prostrate enemy. 

“Pull ’im off, kids!” Bud gasped, but nobody moved; Bud’s 
side of the controversy seemed suddenly to have grown un¬ 
popular. 

“One fella at a time,” said “Fatty” Hartman. 

Ranny pressed one hand, not gently, over Bud’s face and 


i3 6 imaginative writing 

with the other succeeded in reaching the letter in Bud’s pocket. 
Thereupon, still sitting securely upon Bud’s wriggling form, 
he stowed the letter away in his own pocket. 

“Who’s a Chinyman now?” Ranny asked. 

“Let me up,” Bud sputtered in a tone of surrender. 

Ranny released his beaten foe, took the cap that Tom Rucker 
handed him, and let “Fatty” Hartman brush some dust off of 
his knee. Nobody called him names now. 

“It’s all right for you!” Bud said as he started off alone. All 

the other boys laughed. 

But when the excitement was over and Ranny sat alone m 
the “secret den,” his depression returned. He had disposed of 
Bud Hicks and stopped the jeering, but he was just as far from 
being a good American as ever. The “secret den” presently 
changed to a drug-store, wabbled awhile between a robbers 
cave and a picture-gallery, and ended —sure sign of a dis¬ 
ordered universe — as a plain woodshed. 

The six-o’clock whistle was a welcome sound that evening, 
and when the dingy hat appeared, bobbing up and down along 
Webber’s picket fence, Ranny was down the path like an arrow. 
But father, curiously, did not boost him to his shoulder or pull 
the too-big hat down over Ranny’s ears. Instead he acted 
strangely, stopping and gazing thoughtfully at the house, more 
like a tall, thin book-agent than a father. 

“Young man,” he said, “perhaps you can tell me where I 
can find a person by the name of” here he consulted an 
envelope that he had drawn from his pocket “Randolph 
Harrington Dukes?” 

With a wild half-hope Ranny flashed an inquiry up at 
father’s face and pounced upon the envelope. It came upon 
him in a burst of glory — stamp, postmark, and, in a hand¬ 
writing that was faintly familiar, strange and wonderful in their 
new dignity, the words, “Randolph Harrington Dukes, City.” 


DRAMATIC PLOT 


137 


Clasping the letter tightly, Ranny went dancing and skipping 
up the path to bring mother the joyful news. She came out of 
the house wiping her hands on her apron so that she might 
examine the letter. Instead of getting ready for supper, father 
sat down and looked expectant. It was the general opinion that 
the letter should be opened, so Ranny intrusted it to father, 
who read in his best “company” tone: 

Dear Ranny, — When vacation begins, next Thursday, I shall be 
packing my trunk to go away. I want you, if you can, to come to my 
boarding-house in the morning and run some errands for me. Then 
maybe you will help about my plan. I am looking for a bright 
American boy about eight years old, who writes a good hand and 
knows about Washington and Lincoln, to exchange letters with me 
this summer. I have lots of stamps. Maybe you would like to do it. 
I am going first to Washington city, where the government is, and I 
will write you a letter from there. 

Your friend, 

Here father pretended that he could not make out the sig¬ 
nature and asked for a loan of mother’s eyes. Ranny had to 
bombard father’s knee to get the letter. It was signed by — 
“Edith Mills.” 

Randolph Harrington Dukes, City, sat on the gate-post 
after supper, dangling bare, white legs and ruling over a smil¬ 
ing June universe. Foremost in his thoughts was the United 
States government, fathered by Washington, saved by Lincoln, 
and now fallen into the hands of “the interests.” He would 
have to ask father about “the interests” one of these days; 
in fact, there were many things he would have to learn about 
the government — now. 

“I’ll give Bud back his letter to-morrow,” he said to himself, 
“and show him mine.” 

The level rays of the setting sun touched the new-green 
leaves with flame, splashed liquid gold upon the bowed bare 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


I3 8 

head of the wondering little boy. His eyes rested proudly 
upon the breast-pocket of his faded blue jacket; there it gleamed 
where all the passing world might see, his badge of citizenship 
a white envelope and a red stamp. 

“Red, white, and blue/’ said Ranny with a patriotic thrill 
at the discovery. “It’s something like the Fourth of July.” 


CHAPTER XV 


PRESENTATION: THE DRAMATIC TYPE 
OF STORY 

Dramatic presentation. — Just as most short stories resemble 
the drama in type of structure, so too do they resemble the 
drama in method of presentation. The method of the drama 
is to set the story itself on a stage before an audience and to let 
it speak for itself. The playwright cannot himself come for¬ 
ward to explain, to summarize, or to moralize. In a scene or in 
a series of scenes he must let his play-story present itself through 
the movement, the gesture, the facial expression, and the speech 
of the characters in the story. So it is, for the most part, with 
the short-story writer. He too presents his material in a scene 
or in a series of scenes throughout which the people of his story 
talk and act; he too usually lets his story tell itself without 
interruption from him for the purpose of expository comment. 
But the story teller, unlike the playwright, has the power, if 
he insists on taking it, of stalking like a showman through his 
story, dotting its i’s and crossing its t’s. Imagine the simple 
sort of story that most beginners are likely to write, and then 
imagine it underlined with the author’s comment, his un¬ 
necessary elucidation of what needed no explanation, his super¬ 
fluous moralization. These interpolations are so irritating 
that the helpless reader wishes the story teller in the grip of 
the insuperable limitation imposed on the playwright by the 
exigency of his medium. If he is wise, the beginner will volun¬ 
tarily subject himself to the discipline of the playwright and 
use the method of drama. 


139 


140 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


He has, however, one useful possibility of method over and 
above what the playwright has at his command. The play¬ 
wright cannot make transitions. The curtain cuts his play 
into scenes separated by the intervals between the acts. What 
happens in the play-story in these intervals he cannot sum¬ 
marize for his audience. It is a delicate problem of his art to 
get this necessary information to the audience without seeming 
to do so. The story writer, on the other hand, may use a plain 
and simple method, without any disguise. Like the play¬ 
wright, he first decides which of the parts of his story need to 
be presented in scenes; and then, unlike the playwright, he 
may recount the rest of the story briefly in short passages 
between the scenes. 

Let us think of our own story in this light. Which parts of 
our story may the reader rightly demand to have presented 
before him in full? Which parts will he be content, for the 
sake of economy of time and attention, to have recounted for 
him briefly? Obviously, at least the important structural 
points of our story insist on presentation in scenes. Beyond 
this, for each story there will have to be decided the right 
combination of presented scenes and recounted action. 

The scene-plan. — This is our next step. But before we 
take it, let us turn to our short-story guides and see how they 
have solved similar problems. We may take one story that 
impresses us as a particularly good piece of work and write out 
an analysis of it, indicating in some detail the scenes and the 
transitions between them. For each scene we shall want to 
know (i) when and where it takes place, (2) what characters 
take part in it, (3) what relation it bears to the progress of the 
story, and (4) how the transition to the next scene is effected. 
Is it a change in time or a change of place that ends one scene 
and leads to another? Or does an important change in the 
members of the group of characters make us feel that one scene 


DRAMATIC TYPE OF STORY 


141 

ends and another begins? Does the story-writer bridge the 
gap between this scene and the next with a short transition, 
only a sentence — perhaps only a phrase? Or does he write a 
long passage of recounted action? Or does he do neither, but 
resort to the mechanical device of numbering the parts of his 
story, or leaving spaces between them? 

The running scene. — A difficulty that is a little puzzling at 
first in making an analysis of this sort is what we may call the 
running scene, in which one character so dominates the story 
that although the scene moves with her, perhaps from school¬ 
room to street and from street to home, and there from living- 
room to bedroom, in an otherwise uninterrupted stream of 
action, we feel that it is, for all its change of place, one scene 
and we call it one scene in our scene-plan. 

Scene-plan of a selected story. — Let us analyze a few scenes 
of a story, in order that we may realize just how much detail 
we should put into our scene-plan and just what form it may 
take. We may choose “White Bread” by Zona Gale, and 
read the first two or three scenes. 


White Bread 1 
By Zona Gale 

Every one in the room had promised something. Mis’ Tyrus 
Burns offered her receipt for filled cookies. 

“My filled cookie receipt,” she said, “is something that very, 
very few have ever got out of me. I give it to Mis Bradford 
when she moved away. Eve give it to one or two of my kin 
by word of mouth and not wrote down. And Carol Beck had 
it from me when she was married — wrote out on note-paper, 
formal — but understood to be a personal receipt and not general 

“White Bread,” Zona Gale. Harper's Monthly , July, 1916. 


142 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


at all. This’ll be the first time I’ve ever give in to make it 
public, an,d nothing on earth but the church carpet would make 
me now.” 

“Me either, with my Christmas cakes,” said Mis’ Arthur 
Port. “I’ve made ’em for fairs and bazaars and suppers, and 
give the material when I needed it for the children’s shoes, but I 
feel like the time had come for the real supreme sacrifice. I’ll 
put ’em in the book with the rest of you.” 

Mis’ Older’s salad-dressing, Mis’ Eldred’s fruit cordial, 
Mis’ Regg’s mince-meat, Mis’ Emmons’s pie-crust — these 
were all offered up. The basement dining-room of the church 
was filled with women that spring afternoon, and a spirit was 
moving among them like a little flame, kindling each one to 
giving. The place in which they were gathered, its furnace in the 
corner, its reed melodeon for the Sunday-school, its blackboards, 
and its locked cupboards filled with dishes which the women 
had earned when a like flame quickened — this place might 
have been an austere height where they were face to face with 
the ultimate purpose of giving, of being. For abruptly children’s 
shoes, parlor curtains, the little hoard accumulating “overback” 
on a cupboard shelf became as nothing, and the need to be of use 
was on them all, like a cry involuntarily answered to a cry. . . . 

Save only one. Mis’ Jane Mellish sat by the serving-pantry 
door, no more self-forgetful than when she was in her own 
kitchen. 

“What’s the book going to be called?” she had asked when 
they had voted to prepare it. 

“The Katy Town First Church Ladies’ Choice Receipt 
Book,” they had finally decided. 

“How can you call it that if it ain’t all the ladies?” Jane 
had inquired further. “Some o’ the ladies ’ain’t got a choice 
receipt to their names nor their brains.” 

“Such as ’ain’t can see to the printing,” Mis’ Tyrus Burns 


DRAMATIC TYPE OF STORY 143 

suggested. “Would you druther do that, Jane?” she added, 
tartly. 

Jane’s lips moved before she spoke — a little helpless way that 
they had, as if they were not equal to what they must do. 
“Who’s going to write the dedication?” she asked. 

No one had thought of a dedication, but it occurred to no one 
to question it. And the answer was inevitable. 

“You’d ought to do that,” they said to Jane. For who else of 
their number had ever published poems in the Katy Town 
Epitome , and whom else had its editor asked to “do special 
funeral and wedding write-ups ”? 

Jane nodded and hid her relief, and presently faced the ques¬ 
tion which all along she had been dreading: 

“Now, bread. We’d ought to have some real special breads,” 
they said. “Who’s going to do them?” 

Mis’ Holmes’s salt-rising bread, Mis’ Jacobs’s potato-bread, 
Mis’ Grace’s half-graham-and-half-rye — these were all offered. 
It was Mis’ Tyrus Burns who said that which they were all 
thinking. She turned to Jane Mellish. 

“Land! Jane,” she said, “what it’d be to have your white- 
bread receipt for our volume! ” 

At this a hush fell, and they looked at Jane. For years her 
white-bread receipt had baffled them all. Nobody made white 
bread like Jane, and no one could find out how she made it 
whether by flour or mixing, or, as some suspected, a home-made 
lard, or an unknown baking-powder, or a secret yeast packed in 
occasional boxes from Jane’s relatives oversea. Whatever the 
process or the component, she kept it. After a few rebuffs, 
Katy Town understood that the bread was Jane’s prerogative. 
So they praised it to her, and experimented privately, and 
owned to one another their defeat. No one ever asked Jane any 
more. When Mis’ Tyrus Burns did so, the silence was as if some 
one had spoken impertinently, or had made an historical refer- 


144 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


ence too little known to be in good taste, or had quoted 
poetry. 

“I’m going to compose an original dedication,” Jane said, 
stiffly. “I guess, ladies, that’s my share.” 

Mis’ Tyrus Burns sighed. “’Most any of us,” she said, 
“could stodge up a dedication to a book. Or we could even go 
without one, if we just had to. But that white-bread receipt 
of yours had ought to be in this book by rights, Jane Mellish, 
with a page all to itself.” 

Jane was silent. And when little Miss Cold, of her heart’s 
goodness, relieved the moment with, “None of you offered to 
give my cream cake a page all by itself, I notice,” every one 
laughed gratefully, and spoke no more of Jane’s bread. 

Jane walked down the street with the others, and she knew 
of what they were thinking. When she turned alone into her 
own street under the new buds, she went with a sick defiance, 
which her elaborate chatter about house-cleaning had only 
scotched. She left her door open to the friendly evening. The 
rooms were pleasant and commonplace in the westering light; 
her dress was to be changed, there was supper to get, her 
“clothes” had come home and were waiting to be sprinkled; but 
all these were become secondary to the disturbing thing. 

“Mis’ Tyrus Burns always did make things disagreeable for 
everybody,” she thought. “Why should she say what bread 
should go into that book and what bread should stay out of it? ” 

Grandma Mellish was in the kitchen. She had an airy room 
of her own, and the “other” room was warm enough for com¬ 
fort, but she sat in the kitchen. Sometimes she spent wakeful 
nights there. 

“The other furniture bunts out at me,” the old lady had said. 
“I see it’s there. In the kitchen I can think things without 
truck having to be looked at all the time. — Can’t I sit where 
I want? ” she would querulously demand of them. 


DRAMATIC TYPE OF STORY 145 

Of late she had been querulous, too, about certain grinning 
faces on the cook-stove. 

“They’re makin’ fun of what they think you be,” she said 
once. “You can stand there fryin’ things, as moral as the 
minister, but you can’t fool them faces. Dum ’em.” 

She sat in the kitchen now, patching a roller-towel. “Be 
they done clackin’?” she inquired, as Jane entered. 

With the table-cloth in her hand, Jane stooped to her, told 
her about the book and the new church carpet. “They want 
I should put my white-bread receipt in,” she said. 

“The brass!” said Grandma Mellish, shrilly. “The brass!” 

“Ain’t it?” Jane said, softening to the sympathy, and stopped 
in her journey from cupboard to table to tell more of the meet¬ 
ing. The old woman listened; she was very bent, and to listen 
she looked over her stooped shoulder, her lips parted and mov¬ 
ing in her effort to follow. 

“The brass!” she said again. “That receipt’s yours. I 
don’t know how you make it, and I live in the same house with 
you. They’ll want the hair off your head, next. What you goin’ 
to do for their book? ” 

“It’s my book, too,” Jane said. “It’s our book, I s’pose — 
it ain’t all theirs. I’m going to write the dedication — giving it 
away on the front page, you know.” 

“Eh,” said Grandma Mellish. “Well, just you make it 
flowery enough, and put in enough love and heaven, and that 
had ought to satisfy ’em. They’ll want the clothes off your 
back, next.” She broke off and shook her fist at the grinning 
faces on the cooking-stove. “What you smirkin’ at, drat ye?” 
she inquired. 

When supper was ready Jane went out on the porch, and 
there, in order to be away from the droning voice, she waited 
for Molly. Molly was late, but Jane was not hungry. The 
feeling of sick distaste had persisted, so that it was almost physi- 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


146 

cal nausea; and this the old woman’s words, which had at first 
soothed her, now someway intensified. 

What was she caring so much about? she asked herself, in¬ 
dignantly. The bread receipt was hers, and that was all there 
was to it. It had been brought from the old country by her 
great-grandmother Osthelder, and had been handed down from 
mother to daughter. She remembered how jealously it had 
been guarded by her own mother, who had brought the receipt 
West with her when she married; and straightway in her home 
town her bread had become an amazement. Her mother had 
always made the bread for the Communion services, and so had 
Jane. In a fortnight more Jane would be making bread for the 
spring Communion of the First Church. 

“I do enough for them — I guess I do enough for them with 
my receipt,” she thought. “ Besides, it’s Moby’s. I ’ain’t the 
right to give away what’s Molly’s.” 

Molly, co min g from her school, seemed not at all disturbed 
about her rights. She had been teaching for two years, but she 
looked like a school-girl herself as she came round the house. 
She came bareheaded, save for a flutter of white veil on her 
hair; and she was always like one who is met at a day’s begin¬ 
ning, and not at an ending. Only to-night there was a cloud 
on her face, no larger than the white space between her brows. 
But her mother saw. 

“What is it, Molly?” she asked, but the girl laughed and ran 
up-stairs and managed to keep ofl the question until supper was 
done. She had eaten nothing, however; and Jane had eaten 
nothing, because that sick sense of something wrong possessed 
her; only Grandma Mellish ate steadily. “What is it, Molly? ” 
her mother asked again, when the old woman had finished. 

“Well, mother darling,” Molly said, “Ellen Burns has come 
back. At least she’s sent word she’s ready to take the school. 
They’ve offered it to me if I want to stay, but —” 


DRAMATIC TYPE OF STORY 


147 


“But what?” Jane said, sharply. 

“I can’t keep it,” Molly answered. “It was her school. I 
was just a supply while she was sick. Now she’s well, and she 
wants it back.” 

“What’s that?” said Grandma Mellish. “Mis’ Tyrus Burns’s 
girl’s got well? She wants back, after you doin’ her work the 
best o’ two years? What’s the Board say to that?” 

“They haven’t met yet,” Molly said. “But Nat says he 
knows I can stay if I like. Only ” 

“Well, I should think so,” said Grandma Mellish. “It’s a 
good school. You stay. Wants back, does she? The brass! ” 
f, Molly looked at her mother, but Jane did not meet her eyes. 
It would be serious, this loss of the school. There were the three 
of them, and Molly was the breadwinner. If she were to get 
no other school next year. . . . 

“You’ve got the good of the school to think of,” Jane said. 
“You must be the best teacher, or Nat wouldn’t be so sure of the 
Board. The good of the school’s the main thing.” 

Molly shook her head. “I don’t know about my being a 
better teacher,” she said. “I think if they let me stay it 11 
be because Nat Commons is president of the Board.” 

“Nonsense! ” her mother said, with vigor. “ Just because he’s 
taken you to drive once or twice. Anyway, what if it is so? 
You like him, don’t you? You don’t want you should hurt his 
feelings? If you go he’ll think you’re running away from him. 
You’ve got to think of everything.” 

Grandma Mellish was wiping her spectacles on her petticoat. 
“You better keep your cap set for Rufus Commons’s son,” she 
said. “He’s got his pa’s pocket and his grandad’s jaw. Don’t 
you leave him slip through your fingers.” 

Molly rose swiftly and went out on the porch. Her mother’s 
eyes followed her, but she said nothing. As Jane turned back 
to her work, she was aware that her own dull sense of physical 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


148 

ill-being had been multiplied, and she felt a weight within, 
bearing down her chest, changing her breath. 

“I’ve got to get a-hold of myself, 5 ' she thought. “I guess I’ll 
take a dose of something and get into the bed.” . . . 

We may set down our analysis as follows: 

On a spring afternoon, in the basement of the First Church, the 
women of Katy Town are gathered to plan the Choice Receipt Book, 
the sale of which is to buy a new church carpet. Every one in the 
room has offered up some precious recipe, never made public until 
now — every one except Mis’ Jane Mellish. It is Mis Tyrus Burns 
who voices what they are all thinking: “Land! Jane, what it d be 
to have your white bread receipt for our volume!” Jane’s white 
bread has baffled them all. Nobody makes white bread like Jane’s, 
and no one can find out how she makes it. But Jane, who is to com¬ 
pose the dedication of the book, takes refuge behind this: “I’m 
going to compose an original dedication. I guess, ladies, that’s my 
share.” The scene ends: “And when little Miss Cold, of her heart’s 
goodness, relieved the moment with, ‘None of you offered to give my 
cream cake a page all by itself, I notice, 5 every one laughed gratefully, 
and spoke no more of Jane’s bread.” 

The transition to the next scene begins: “Jane walked down the 
street with the others, and she knew of what they were thinking. 
When she turned alone into her own street under the new buds, she 
went with a sick defiance, which her elaborate chatter about house¬ 
cleaning had only scotched.” It continues through a bit of descrip¬ 
tion which helps us to realize her rooms, pleasant and commonplace 
in the spring evening air, and her task of getting supper — all 
secondary now, however, to her feeling of disturbance. 

The second scene opens with Grandma Mellish sitting in the 
kitchen, patching a roller towel, and it gives us her comment on what 
Jane, in her journey from cupboard to table, tells her about the 
meeting. “The brass!” says Grandma Mellish. “That receipt’s 
yours. . . . They’ll want the hair off your head next. ...” It 
is a short scene, and the transition to the next scene comes soon, begin¬ 
ning, “When supper was ready Jane went out on the porch, and there, 
in order to be away from the droning voice, she waited for Molly.” 
While she waits, Jane broods over her secret, her white bread receipt, 


DRAMATIC TYPE OF STORY 


149 


“brought from the old country by her great-grandmother Osthelder,” 
and “handed down from mother to daughter.” Molly comes home 
from the school where she teaches, and, although her mother sees 
“a cloud on her face, no larger than the white space between her 
brows,” the girl will not tell what troubles her until supper is done. 

Then the third scene opens with “ ‘What is it, Molly?’ her mother 
asked again, when the old woman had finished.” Molly tells them 
that Ellen Burns, the girl who had taught the Katy Town school and 
who had left the year before because of illness, is better and wants 
the school again. The Board has offered the school to Molly if she 
will stay, but Molly feels that she cannot keep it: “I was just a supply 
while she was sick.” Grandma Mellish thinks Molly should keep her 
school: “You stay. Wants back, does she? The brass!” Jane 
thinks of what the loss of the school will mean to them, but what she 
says is “You’ve the good of the school to think of,” and when Molly 
shakes her head and answers, “I think if they let me stay it’ll be 
because Nat Commons is president of the Board,” her mother says 
again, “You like him, don’t you? You don’t want to hurt his feel¬ 
ings? . . . You’ve got to think of everything to which Grandma 
Mellish adds, “You better keep your cap set for Rufus Commons’s 
son. . . . Don’t you leave him slip through your fingers.” The 
scene ends with Molly’s going out on the porch and her mother’s 
turning back to her work with her sense of ill-being multiplied. 

Before the next scene the writer leaves a space, after which 
she brings Mis’ Tyrus Burns round to find Molly on the porch 
and to tell her what happened at the meeting. The story goes 
on, tracing Jane’s attitude toward the two problems. Be¬ 
cause of this twofold interest, the plot is more complicated 
than those that we have been considering, but the issue emerges 
clearly enough. What we have given of scene-plan shows what 
seems to be the most helpful way of writing it. It should be 
as detailed as this because the story teller should never get 
into the habit of thinking of his story in any but the most 
concrete terms, even when he is writing a summary of it. An 
abstract scene-plan often leads to a baldly told story. And as 
this scene-plan of some one else’s story is only a preliminary to 


i5° 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


the scene-plan of our own story, we are writing it in the manner 
that we shall at once use for our own. Since this is still, however, 
a scene-plan of some one else’s story, it may be admitted, in 
passing, that it may not be exactly the scene-plan that the 
writer of the story had in mind; it may not be in detail the 
scene-plan that every reader would outline for the story. Many 
differences in analysis are possible. One reader, for example, 
may designate as a concretely written part of a passage be¬ 
tween scenes what another may consider a short scene in itself. 
Such differences should not disturb us. In fact, they are salu¬ 
tary, rather than otherwise, for they remind us that there is 
nothing sacrosanct about this analysis or about any of the 
forms into which our study of writing puts itself. That we 
analyze at all is merely incidental in our process of learning 
how to write. 

Value of this analysis. — Our scene-plan and the scene- 
plans of our neighbors will have given us a knowledge of the 
sort of phrase or sentence or longer passage that practiced 
writers use in traveling from scene to scene. It will not be a 
bad prop for a beginner to have in his notebook a few examples 
of phrases and sentences that indicate lapse of time, change of 
place, and change in grouping of characters. These may serve 
as a reminder that usually these transitions should stand out 
in the story as little as a seam in a dress; they should be deftly 
inconspicuous. This dexterity, however, is important only 
because the lack of it hampers both writer and reader. What 
the scene-plan can give us that is of much more importance is 
a feeling for the molding of scenes on the structural pattern. 
For this, no rules can be formulated. We may say that the 
scenes should not take long leaps in time or place, but this 
is already implied in our conception of the short story. Beyond 
this, we may say that some stories have a most exact symmetry 
of scene, only to note immediately that others, just as good, 


DRAMATIC TYPE OF STORY 


151 

have not. “ A Day Off,” for example, is a story not of one day, 
but of two days, each beginning with early morning and ending 
with going to bed at night, — the first, however, proceeding 
from the defeat of Abigail’s desire to make a cake to the un¬ 
happy end of a day of thwarted plans; the second going for¬ 
ward from Abigail’s triumphant cracking of two eggs in her 
cake-making to the happy ending of a day that has brought 
Clary what she wished. But for one story like this, we may 
find, without looking far for them, a dozen stories that have 
no such symmetry. Nor can we say that successive scenes 
must be, if not symmetrical, at least similar, because, although 
Thyra Samter Winslow successfully continues at dinner the 
discussion that her “City Folks” began at breakfast, many be¬ 
ginners manage to get nothing but monotony from such an 
arrangement. No, we can fashion no hard-and-fast rules; but 
we can, from our careful examination of stories that hold our 
interest, gain a feeling for a succession of scenes that shall tell 
our story as we want it told and shall, in turn, hold the interest 
of our readers. 

Writing our scene-plan. — Thus we proceed to write the 
scene-plan of our own story and then to bring it to class for 
comment and suggestion. This scene-plan should be less an 
outline of something that is still to be written and more a 
setting down of what has already been acted out in our minds. 
On our way to and from class, in the half-hour before we get 
to sleep at night, at odd minutes during the day, the people of 
our story should be with us. We should hear what they say 
and see what they do. We should be shaping their life into 
the scenes of our story. Our scene-plan, accordingly, will 
be a record of a drama that has been acted or is being acted, 
not a theoretical diagram of something that has as yet no 
existence. In this record, it is as well not to attempt to write 
out transitional passages word for word, as we have done for 


152 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


the stories of others, but merely to indicate the nature of the 
transition, if this is not sufficiently suggested by the scenes 
themselves. For the story will, like all our writing, gain a 
certain momentum and will swing into a certain rhythm of its 
own when we are engaged in the actual process of writing it, 
and what this is we cannot be sure of until the time of writing 


comes. 


CHAPTER XVI 

THE SCENE 


The scene itself. — We are ready now to begin writing our 
story. And as we are thinking of it as a succession of scenes 
and as it is possible that our very beginning may be a scene, 
we first examine a scene closely to see how it is put together. 
We may take a scene that shows this very simply and clearly, 
a scene from Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen , x which, although it 
does not open a short story, might very well do so. 

“Will-ee!” 

To William, in his high and lonely mood, this piercing summons 
brought an actual shudder, and the very thought of Jane (with tokens 
of apple sauce and sugar still upon her cheek, probably) seemed a 
kind of sacrilege. He fiercely swore his favorite oath, acquired from 
the hero of a work of fiction he admired, “Ye gods!” and concealed 
his poem in the drawer of the writing-table, for Jane’s footsteps were 
approaching his door. 

“Will-ee! Mamma wants you.” She tried the handle of the door. 

“G’way!” he said. 

“Will-ee!” Jane hammered upon the door with her fist. 
“Will-ee!” 

“What you want?” he shouted. 

Jane explained, certain pauses indicating that her attention was 
partially diverted to another slice of bread-and-butter and apple 
sauce and sugar. “Will-ee, mamma wants you — wants you to go 
help Genesis bring some wash-tubs home — and a tin clo’es-boiler —■». 
from the second-hand man’s store.” 

“PPM” 

Jane repeated the outrageous message, adding, “Sfie wants you 
1 Seventeen, Booth Tarkington. Harper. 
iS3 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


154 

to hurry — and I got some more bread-and-butter and apple sauce 
and sugar for cornin’ to tell you.” 

William left no doubt in Jane’s mind about his attitude in reference 
to the whole matter. His refusal was direct and infuriated, but, in 
the midst of a multitude of plain statements which he was making, 
there was a decisive tapping upon the door at a point higher than 
Jane could reach, and his mother’s voice interrupted: 

“Hush, Willie! Open the door, please.” 

He obeyed furiously, and Mrs. Baxter walked in with a deprecating 
air, while Jane followed, so profoundly interested that, until almost 
the close of the interview, she held her bread-and-butter and apple 
sauce and sugar at a sort of way-station on its journey to her mouth. 

“That’s a nice thing to ask me to do!” stormed the unfortunate 
William. “Ye gods! Do you think Joe Bullitt’s mother would dare 
to—” 

“Wait, dearie!” Mrs. Baxter begged, pacifically. “I just want 
to explain —” 

“ Explain! Ye gods! ” 

“Now, now, just a minute, Willie!” she said. “What I wanted 
to explain was why it’s necessary for you to go with Genesis for the —” 

“Never!” he shouted. “Never! You expect me to walk through 
the public streets with that awful-lookin’ old nigger —” 

“Genesis isn’t old,” she managed to interpolate. “He—” 

But her frantic son disregarded her. “Second-hand wash-tubs!” 
he vociferated. “And tin clothes-boilers! That's what you want 
your son to carry through the public streets in broad day fight! Ye 
gods!” 

“Well, there isn’t anybody else,” she said. “Please don’t rave 
so, Willie, and say ‘Ye gods’ so much; it really isn’t nice. I’m sure 
nobody’ll notice you —” 

“‘Nobody’!” His voice cracked in anguish. “Oh no! Nobody 
except the whole town! Why, when there’s anything disgusting has 
to be done in this family — why do I always have to be the one? 
Why can’t Genesis bring the second-hand wash-tubs without me? 
Why can’t the second-hand store deliver ’em? Why can’t —” 

“That’s what I want to tell you,” she interposed, hurriedly, and as 
the youth lifted his arms on high in a gesture of ultimate despair, and 
then threw himself miserably into a chair, she obtained the floor. 
“The second-hand store doesn’t deliver things,” she said. “I bought 


THE SCENE 


*55 

them at an auction, and it’s going out of business, and they have to 
be taken away before half past four this afternoon. Genesis can’t 
bring them in the wheelbarrow, because, he says, the wheel is broken, 
and he says he can’t possibly carry two tubs and a wash-boiler him¬ 
self; and he can’t make two trips because it’s a mile and a half, and 
I don’t like to ask him, anyway; and it would take too long, because 
he has to get back and finish cutting the grass before your papa gets 
home this evening. Papa said he had to! Now, I don’t like to ask 
you, but it really isn’t much. You and Genesis can just slip up there 
and —” 

“ Slip! ” moaned William. “ ‘ Just slip up there! ’ Ye gods! ” 

“Genesis is waiting on the back porch,” she said. “Really it isn’t 
worth your making all this fuss about.” 

“Oh no!” he returned, with plaintive satire. “It’s nothing! 
Nothing at all!” 

“Why, / shouldn’t mind it,” she said briskly, “if I had the time. 
In fact, I’ll have to, if you won’t.” 

“Ye gods!” He clasped his head in his hands, crushed, for he 
knew that the curse was upon him and he must go. “Ye gods!” 

And then, as he stamped to the door, his tragic eye fell upon Jane, 
and he emitted a final cry of pain: 

“ Can’t you ever wash your face? ” he shouted. 

Scene structure. — It is clear that this scene owes its interest 
partly to its structure; it is a short story in miniature. With 
almost its first word we are given a hint — more than a hint 
of conflict, in Willie’s reception of Jane’s message. Jane is 
followed by Mrs. Baxter, but, although Willie shouts, “Never!” 
his resistance is beaten down by his mother’s calm and her 
explanation, when she gets a chance to give it. If we re-read 
scenes from a few of the short stories on our list, we shall be 
able to tell whether all scenes rise with the defiance of a 
Willie and fall with his defeat; or whether, without this turn 
in their action, some of them progress undeviatingly from a 
first hint to an inevitable goal. While we are examining 
scenes with this in mind, moreover, we shall be deciding the 
structure of the opening scene in our own short story; and, 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


156 

as we go over it again and again, we shall be strengthening 
its line of action, — perhaps omitting some passage of conversa¬ 
tion that may mislead a reader as to its direction; perhaps add¬ 
ing some interchange of speeches that will help him to follow. 

Scene development through conversation. — Mr. Tarking- 
ton’s scene, however, holds us at least as much by his method of 
making his structure manifest, as it does by the structure itself. 
I have yet to meet a reader who is not of the same mind as the 
old lady in Miss Repplier’s essay “Conversation in Novels.” 
“She glanced over a story very rapidly, and if it had too many 
solid, page-long paragraphs — reflections, descriptions, etc. — 
she put it sadly but steadfastly aside. If, on the contrary, it 
was well broken up into conversations, which always impart 
an air of sprightliness to a book, she said she was sure she would 
lik e it, and carried it off in triumph.” 

Plot and character through conversation. — And why should 
we not like to get our story through conversation? In life we 
learn more about our friends — their actions and their charac¬ 
ters — through listening to their talk than in any other way. 
So it is in books. From the conversation in Seventeen , we learn 
about the loathsome task that confronts Willie; thus the ac¬ 
tion of the story is advanced. And from the manner in which 
Willie and his mother talk we become acquainted with their 
character. We learn that in Willie there is a quality — per¬ 
haps an exaggerated sense of his prominence in the landscape — 
that makes utterly abhorrent to him the thought of appearing 
in public with Genesis and the second-hand washtubs. And 
we learn that Mrs. Baxter has an unruffled calm in the face of 
violent opposition, which the mother of a Willie may often find 
useful. The conversation, then, has brought the story forward, 
and it has allowed the people of the story to show their character 
as they would in life. 

Conversation like this looks simple enough as we read it. It 


THE SCENE 


157 


seems as though all we need do is get pencil and paper and 
write. Yet as we sit, pencil poised above paper, the writing 
does not come so quickly as we thought it would. There are 
so many things to think of all at once! Perhaps it will go better 
if we take our drama model again and write our conversation, 
first, as we should if we were constructing a play. If we were 
to do this with Mr. Tarkington’s speeches, they would look like 
this: 

Willie. That’s a nice thing to ask me to do! Ye gods! Do you 
think Joe Bullitt’s mother would dare to — 

Mrs. Baxter. Wait, dearie! I just want to explain — 

Willie. Explain! Ye gods! 

If we find that this enables us to get our first conversation on 
paper more easily, we may as well continue it throughout our 
entire first scene. 

Spoken English different from written English. — Even in 
this first draft, however, we find enough to consider. Spoken 
English is very different from even the most informal written 
English. When we write, we are capable of long paragraphs; 
yet only when our companions are too breathless to interrupt 
us — as Willie is when his mother obtains the floor — are we 
permitted long speeches in conversation. The speeches in our 
scene, then, if they are to be true to life, must be short. Indeed, 
Mrs. Baxter does not always get a chance to finish even one 
sentence! “Wait, dearie! I just want to explain . . . 
What I wanted to explain was why it’s necessary for you to go 
with Genesis for the— . . . Genesis isn’t old. He ” Of 
course when our speakers are less excited than Willie, we shall 
have fewer sentences broken off before they reach their period. 
But in all conversation, sentences, as well as speeches, are 
likely to be short, or, if they grow beyond the brevity of the 
simple sentence, they use the and of the compound sentence 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


158 

rather than the subordinating connectives of the complex 
sentence. Mrs. Baxter in her explanation of the reason for 
Willie’s degradation uses two and' s in one sentence, four in the 
next. 

It is necessary for story tellers to listen with particular atten¬ 
tiveness to the speech of the people about them because in 
writing they are accustomed to the sentence-forms, the vo¬ 
cabulary, and the inflection of written English; and unless they 
consciously train themselves to catch and to record the actual 
speech habits of actual people, their conversation will sound so 
unnatural that it will rob their whole story of the appearance 
of life. Mrs. Baxter does not say, “The second-hand store does 
not deliver things. ... It is going out of business. . . . 
Genesis cannot bring them in the wheelbarrow. ... I shall 
have to, if you will not." She uses doesn't, it's, can't, I'll, won't, 
the frequent contractions of colloquial English. Willie goes 
further. He leaves off his final g in awful-lookin', and his initial 
th in 'em. When Jane speaks, all that she has been taught about 
grammar and pronunciation cannot prevent her from talking 
like this: 

“Well ... I guess it’s good I did, because look — that’s the 
very reason mamma did somep’m so’s he can’t come any more except 
in daytime. I guess she thought Willie oughtn’t to behave so’s’t you 
said so many things about him like that; so to-day she did somep’m, 
an’ now he can’t come any more to behave that loving way of 
Miss Pratt that you said you would be in the lunatic asylum if he 
didn’t quit.” 

Accordingly the beginner will, if he is wise, devote a section of 
his notebook to the jotting down of representative scraps of 
conversation. And even when politeness or the discretion which 
is the better part of valor demands that his notebook stay in 
his pocket, he will store in his memory the usage of his circle. 


THE SCENE 


159 


Dialect. — This may bring the writers of some stories to the 
troublesome question of dialect. Punch’s advice to the man 
about to be married, “ Don’t,” although the theme reader is 
often tempted to give it wholesale to young writers, is not a 
fair solution of the problem. Perhaps there is no solution — 
for young writers. They have not the knowledge of linguistics 
that would enable them to record correctly what they hear. 
They have not the knowledge of their reading public that would 
enable them to know just how much trouble it will take to de¬ 
cipher dialect for the sake of the story concealed in it. If, how¬ 
ever, their story is about people who speak a dialect, in dialect 
the conversation of their story must be written. Each must 
experiment for himself until he arrives at some workable com¬ 
bination of realism and readability. He will probably be able 
to find, too, some writer of experience who has used much the 
same field and whose example will be helpful to him. 

Speech individualized. — The first draft written, the student 
will re-read it critically. He will ask himself whether it sounds 
like talk, like the talk of the kind of people whom he is setting 
forth in his story. And then he will ask further whether he has 
been able to make the talk of a Willie sound different from the 
talk of a Mrs. Baxter. He will agree that in Mr. Tarkington’s 
story the one is distinguished from the other so that, even if the 
speeches were unmarked by the names of mother or son, they 
would still be attributed by the reader, without difficulty and 
without possibility of mistake, to the right speaker. Mr. Tark- 
ington, it is true, avails himself of the time-honored device of 
stamping the speech of Willie with a characteristic phrase, often 
repeated. “ Ye gods! ” says Willie. Yet, although this method is 
frowned upon by severe critics, is it not, unless it is carried to a 
ridiculous extreme and applied to almost every one in the story, 
true to life? Can we not all at once recall acquaintances whose 
speech is punctuated with some such tag as Willie’s? And even 


160 IMAGINATIVE WRITING 

without the tag, Willie’s words are clearly his and not his 
mother’s. 

The concomitants of speech. — If what we have written 
satisfies us now as being natural and sufficiently individual, it 
is ready for another step toward its appearance in short-story 
form. Indeed, if we turn again to our drama model, we shall 
find that even here the pages give us much more than merely 
the name of the speaker and the words that he says. In any 
play we may see something like this: 

Gilbey [ grinding his teeth ]. This is a nice thing. This is a b— 

Mrs. Gilbey [cutting him short]. Leave it at that, please. What¬ 
ever it is, bad language won’t make it better. 

Gilbey [bitterly]. Yes, put me in the wrong as usual. Take your 
boy’s part against me. [He flings himself into the empty chair 
opposite her. 1 2 ] 

We scarcely need go over the few lines from Mr. Tarkington’s 
scene, inserting, after Willie, storming, and after Mrs. Baxter, 
pacifically; but we must now rewrite our own scene, giving it 
the tone of voice, the gesture, the action, of life. Our task is, in 
a way, more difficult than the playwright’s. We have not his 
convenient square brackets. What we interpolate we must 
somehow weave into the fabric of the story. But, like him, we 
must give not only the words, but all that accompanies them. 
As they speak, people smile or scowl. They whisper or they 
shout. They giggle or they sob. They speak while they are 
smoking or sewing or eating or walking. All this, as much as 
the words spoken, belongs to the scene that we are writing. 
Again a careful examination of what others have written may 
help us to a use of all the possibilities. As we turn the pages of 
a collection like The Best Stories of 1925, 2 we find: 

1 Fanny's First Play , Bernard Shaw. Brentano. 

2 The Best Stones of 1925, edited by Edward J. O’Brien. Small, Maynard. 


THE SCENE 


161 


“Here I be,” she said, catching hold of his hand to guide him to 
the table. 

“I smell fish this morning,” the blind man said cheerfully, as he 
spread his hands to touch the knife and fork at his place. 

“Yes, we got fish.” Annie speared one with a fork and took out 
the backbone. She put milk and sugar in his coffee, cut up a piece 
of fat pork, and put the plate down in front of him. “ There you air! ” 
She helped her own plate and sat down again . 1 

Setting down conversation. — Notice that, as we hear the 
man and woman talk, we see what they are doing. Sometimes 
the writer works their action into the sentence that gives us 
their words (using in one sentence the participial phrase catch¬ 
ing hold of his hand to guide him to the table and in another a 
clause introduced by as); and sometimes she takes a separate 
sentence or even more, as she does in the last paragraph of the 
selection just given. In another story we have 

“Hand over your gun!” Pringle demanded. 

The youth straightened himself with a flicker of confidence. “I 
ain’t got none!” he threw back. 

Pringle searched him: he had told the truth. “Come then, give 
me a hand here!” he commanded, laying his own weapon on the 
table . 2 

Again the writer is careful to make us see what the people in 
the story are doing as they talk. This writer’s habit is to give 
us the action first and the words after it, rather than, like the 
other writer, to follow the words with the action. 

Sometimes the action not only accompanies the words but 
expresses the mood of the words: 

Amelia marched across from the sink, her round shoulders raised, 
shaking her dish-towel angrily. ... 3 

“Now, Maw—” but the sound of the kitchen door slamming to 

1 “The Gift,” Sandra Alexander. The Reviewer. 

2 “ The Hands of the Enemy,” Charles Caldwell Dobie. Harper’s Monthly. 

3 “Fire and Water,” Glenway Wescott. Collier’s. 


162 IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


behind Mrs. Pettishall drowned Widden’s vain attempts to make 
peace . 1 

Judge Rodenbaugh lowered his head, stared at the carpet with 
an angry frown. Then he rose, thrust his hands into his pockets, 
his face turned away, his chin sunk in a heavy fold between the 
square points of his collar. “I don’t propose, Judge,” he began ... 2 


Often the writer feels that the flow of conversation is too 
swift to be held up by long interpolations, and he compresses 
the mood into a word — half-heartedly, humbly, harshly, 
mildly, triumphantly. It must be remembered that these 
words are, in a way, labels like those we rejected in our earlier 
writing about people. They should be used very sparingly; 
the words and the actions of the speakers should themselves 
carry their mood to the reader without the expository interven¬ 
tion of the author. A page spotted with a rash of -ly’s is, more¬ 
over, sure to have on its reader the effect so feelingly expressed 
in the following letter, which I have kept for a long time without, 
I am ashamed to say, preserving the name of the newspaper 
from which I clipped it: 


Sir: In that $10,000 prize novel of Leona Dalrymple’s — Diana 
of the Green Van — these appear in the dialogue of the first fifty 


pages: 

exclaimed readily 
said maliciously 
said disapprovingly 
said discouragingly 
said politely 
resumed offensively 
snapped sourly 
demanded irritably 
exclaimed devoutly 
said steadily 
said impudently 


said pityingly 
said gently 
rapped lightly 
begged happily 
smiled readily 
said maliciously 
offered cordially 
said lamely 
hinted coolly 
said curtly 
said civilly 


finished carelessly 
sniffed tragically 
sang happily 
said pleasantly 
shrugged carelessly 
sniffed tragically 
asked vaguely 
exclaimed rapturously 
said politely 
added fairly 
said suavely 


Old Man Ledge,” May Stanley. Pictorial Review. 
Coward’s Castle,” Walter Gilkyson. Atlantic Monthly. 


THE SCENE 


163 


exclaimed restlessly reminded curiously 

commented critically said honestly 

countered lightly puffed helplessly 

said calmly breathed incredulously 

flashed pointedly wheedled gently 

stammered lamely gurgled presently 

purred correctively said flatly 

exclaimed viciously laughed radiantly 

said whimsically said pityingly 

admitted ruefully demanded elaborately 


said dryly 
exclaimed quietly 
said formally 
added guilelessly 
said smoothly 
said gratefully 
sympathized smoothly 
began slowly 


There are 441 pages, but I could read no farther. I was overcome 
horribly, exhausted completely and quit absolutely. Was it not 
Coleridge who said: “The want of adverbs in the Iliad is very 
characteristic”? 


Yours distressfully, 


W. H. E. 


Thus far we have said nothing about the verb to say , on which, 
together with its many substitutes, we must depend to indicate 
who is speaking. It is possible, of course, to set down a rapid 
exchange of remarks without tacking to each of them the name 
of the speaker: 

A second, staring there into space, Mrs. Kaufman sat with her 
arm still entwining the slender but lax form. “ Ruby, is — is it 
something you ain’t telling mamma? ” 

“Oh, mommy, mommy!” 

“Is there?” 

“I — I don’t know.” 

“Ruby, should you be afraid to talk to mamma, who don’t want 
nothing but her child’s happiness? ” 

“You know, mommy. You know!” 

“Know what, baby?” 

“I —er—” 

“Is there somebody else you got on your mind, baby?” 

“You know, mommy.” 

“ Tell mamma, baby. It ain’t a — a crime if you got maybe some¬ 
body else on your mind.” 1 

1 “Ice Water, PI- 1 ” in Gaslight Sonatas , Fannie Hurst. Harper. 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


164 

Beginners, however, must be certain that the reader can tell at 
once who says each line. If the reader has to work his way, 
speech by speech, back to some clue to the speakers and then 
down the page again, marking this speech for A, that for B, 
the effect on his enjoyment of the story is not a happy one. 

Usually he said or some substitute for he said must be used. 
Again the student may study the practice of experienced writers 
to see what kinds of substitutes are possible. The best, he will 
find, is the sort of word that contributes something besides mere 
glue to the sentence, something of the sound of the voice, like 
whispered, sighed, muttered, mumbled, grumbled, growled , called , 
shouted, screamed, sighed. Next in value are words that, without 
reproducing sound, have some definiteness of meaning and are 
still more than plus signs, — commented, acquiesced, confessed , 
advised, repeated, asked, inquired, queried, demanded, replied, 
responded, retorted, contended, exclaimed, continued, persisted. An 
unbroken succession of colorless he said’s, however, is scarcely 
worse than an avoidance of them so ingenious that it distracts 
the reader from the conversation itself. Against this practice, 
Mr. Franklin P. Adams 1 protests in 

Monotonous Variety 
(all of them from two stories in a single magazine ) 

She ‘greeted’ and he ‘volunteered’; 

She‘giggled’; he‘asserted’; 

She ‘queried’ and he Tightly veered’; 

She ‘drawled’ and he ‘averted’; 

She ‘scoffed,’ she ‘laughed’ and he ‘averred’; 

He ‘mumbled,’ ‘parried,’ and ‘demurred.’ 

She ‘languidly responded’; he 
‘Incautiously assented’; 

1 Tobogganing on Parnassus , Franklin P. Adams. Doubleday, Page. 


THE SCENE 


165 


Doretta ‘proffered lazily’; 

Will ‘speedily invented’; 

She ‘parried,’ ‘whispered,’ ‘bade,’ and ‘mused’; 

He ‘urged,’ ‘acknowledged,’ and ‘refused.’ 

She‘softly added’; she‘alleged’; 

He ‘consciously invited’; 

She ‘ then corrected ’; William ‘ hedged ’; 

She ‘prettily recited’; 

She ‘nodded,’ ‘stormed,’ and ‘acquiesced’; 

He ‘promised,’ ‘hastened,’ and ‘confessed.’ 

Doretta‘chided’; ‘cautioned’Will; 

She ‘voiced’ and he ‘defended’; 

She ‘ vouchsafed ’; he ‘ continued still ’; 

She ‘sneered’ and he ‘amended’; 

She ‘smiled,’ she ‘twitted,’ and she ‘dared’; 

He ‘scorned,’ ‘exclaimed,’ ‘pronounced,’ and ‘flared.’ 

He ‘waived,’ ‘believed,’ ‘explained,’ and ‘tried’; 

‘Commented’she; he‘muttered’; 

She ‘blushed,’ she ‘dimpled,’ and she ‘sighed’; 

He ‘ventured’ and he ‘stuttered’; 

She ‘spoke,’ ‘suggested,’ and ‘pursued’; 

He ‘pleaded,’ ‘pouted,’ ‘called,’ and ‘viewed.’ 

O synonymble writers, ye 

Whose work is so high-pricey, 

Think ye not that variety 
May haply be too spicy? 

Meseems that in an elder day 
They had a thing or two to say. 

Paragraphing and punctuation of conversation. Is it neces¬ 
sary to say anything about the paragraphing and punctuation 
of conversation? My experience occasionally brings me in 
contact with young people who have reached what is probably 
their thirteenth year of schooling without recognizing that a 


166 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


passage of conversation is broken into paragraphs as speaker 
follows speaker, each speech being set in a paragraph by itself, 
even if it consists of only one word or a fragment of one word. 
And although the teaching of the punctuation of quotation 
comes in many public schools somewhere in the vicinity of the 
fourth year of the elementary course of study, it may be brought 
freshly to the mind of people very much beyond the fourth 
grade. If you wish your words as author to introduce the words 
of your character, what you write will be punctuated as follows: 

Then he said haltingly, “ I am very grateful to you, Netta.” 1 
If your words are to follow the speech, you have: 

“ I’ll telephone up,” stammered the clerk. 

If the speech is to be broken by the interpolation, it may be 
punctuated thus: 

“My mother doesn’t understand anything about my position,” he 
said harshly. “There’s nothing you can do for me. Sorry you had 
the trip. And now you had better get out as soon as possible. How 
did they happen to let you up here?” 

Or, if your interpolation is itself a complete sentence, you use 
the dash before and after it; and if, in addition, it interrupts a 
sentence of the speech, you continue the interrupted sentence 
with a small letter as in the following: 

“Oh, how glad I am, Mrs. Hunting. Why” — the girl spoke 
softly — “it is almost worth while it should have happened if it brings 
you together again.” 

If the speeches, by the way, are not very short, the reader pre¬ 
fers the author’s words either preceding the speeches or breaking 
them not many words after their opening. He wants to know 
at once who is talking. 

1 These illustrations are taken from “An Army with Banners,” Katharine 
Fullerton Gerould, Harper's Monthly , reprinted in The Best Short Stories of 
1925. 


THE SCENE 


167 


Notice, too, that a correct paragraphing of what some critics, 
following the analogy of the drama, call “stage business” will 
eliminate the necessity for using the he said’s or their equiva¬ 
lent: 

His face crimsoned. “You know as well as anything that I can’t 
run an apartment and the house both.” 

“We’ll talk tomorrow. I’m awfully tired now. Good-night.” 
He slipped into his bed, leaving her to put out the lamp and raise the 
windows. 

The pale girl flushed. “Oh, no, Mrs. Hunting. There wasn’t 
a thing — ever!” She gave a little involuntary shiver. 

Description in the scene. — Even now, after having rewritten 
our scene so as to add to speech its accessories of expression, 
tone, gesture, and action, we have still not done for it all that the 
playwright 'does for his. In any play we find passages like 
this: 

It is noon. In the Underwoods’ dining-room a bright fire is burn¬ 
ing. On one side of the fireplace are double doors leading to the 
drawing-room, on the other side a door leading to the hall. In the 
centre of the room a long dining-table without a cloth is set out as a 
Board table. At the head of it, in the Chairman’s seat, sits John 
Anthony, an old man, big, clean-shaven, and high-coloured, with 
thick white hair, and thick dark eyebrows. His movements are 
rather slow and feeble, but his eyes are very much alive. There is 
a glass of water by his side. On his right sits his son Edgar, an 
earnest-looking man of thirty, reading a newspaper. Next him 
Wanklin, a man with jutting eyebrows, and silver-streaked light hair, 
is bending over transfer papers. Tench, the Secretary, a short and 
rather humble, nervous man, with side whiskers, stands helping him. 
On Wanklin’s right sits Underwood, the Manager, a quiet man, with 
a long, stiff jaw, and steady eyes. Back to the fire is Scantlebury, 
a very large, pale, sleepy man, with grey hair, rather bald. Between 
him and the Chairman are two empty chairs. 1 

1 The Silver Box , John Galsworthy. Scribner. 


i68 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


Here again the playwright’s method is easier than ours. He may 
put all his description, of place and persons, in one passage and 
add to it only to describe additional people as they make their 
appearance on the scene. If our task as short-story writers is 
harder, however, it results in pleasanter reading. We also 
must enable the reader to make pictures of place and people, 
but we are not permitted to mass our description in a solid 
block at the beginning of our scene and have done with it. 
When our readers have finished our story, they will have a com¬ 
plete picture of John Anthony; but they will have built it up 
as they read, learning about his movements, slow and feeble, 
as he makes them, and of his eyes, very much alive, as he uses 
them. In a word, we apply here the methods that we were at 
pains to learn when we were writing our descriptions of people. 
As our characters act and talk, we describe them acting and 
talking; but, in the short story, as it is short, the limitation 
of space discourages long passages of description at any one 
point; and we are inclined to distribute our description, a bit 
here and a bit there, often running it through the conversation 
in our interpolations. For, although for convenience’ sake, we 
are talking of conversation and description separately, we must 
remember that the story is a whole, all its parts fusing into 
story, and nothing else. Henry James in his paper “The Art of 
Fiction,” to which we have already referred several times, gives 
us this emphatic reminder: 

People often talk of these things [description and dialogue , incident 
and description] as if they had a kind of internecine distinctness, 
instead of melting into each other at every breath, and being inti¬ 
mately associated parts of one general effort of expression. I cannot 
imagine composition existing in a series of blocks, nor conceive . . . 
of a passage of description that is not in its intention narrative, a 
passage of dialogue that is not in its intention descriptive, a touch 
of truth of any sort that does not partake of the nature of 
incident. ... A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like 


THE SCENE 


169 

any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I 
think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other 
parts. 

From this point of view let us again go over our scene, this time 
to make sure that it gives, not only speech and action, but also 
pictures of setting and characters, all as “ intimately associated 
parts of one general effort of expression,” “a living thing, all 
one and continuous.” . 

Then we shall be almost ready to cast aside the last of these 
preliminaries. They have progressed from our first draft of our 
scene as the spoken word only, through our re-working of it 
to include tone of voice, expression, and action, to this latest 
re-writing, which has made visible the environment in which it 
moves and the characters who speak and act in it. We say 
not ready but almost ready because our scene is not an entity, 
existing by and for itself, but an integral part of a larger whole, 
the complete story, to which it must accommodate itself and 
whose purposes it must serve. 


CHAPTER XVII 


SPECIAL PARTS OF THE STORY 

The opening scene. — If we wish our story to begin at once 
with a scene, and if we have succeeded in making our scene 
solid, full-bodied, existing in three dimensions, evident to the 
eyes and the ears as well as to the intelligence of our readers — 
if we have written a scene like this, it may stand as it is at the 
opening of our story. For if it is all this, it will have given our 
readers all that they need to know to go on with the story with 
interest and understanding. They will need to be aware of the 
milieu, the geographical and social background of the story, the 
air it breathes. They will need to have a sense of the tone, 
the mood of the story, sober or gay, which it aims to have its 
readers share. They will need to meet the characters of the story, 
the important ones at least. They will need to know about the 
situation from which the story springs. All this information our 
scene will have conveyed to them in that manner which is the 
method of life and of fiction. That is, they will have gathered it 
all from the scene, without having it expounded to them as 
though they were without the intelligence to read and under¬ 
stand a story without the author’s gloss. 

Other openings. — We may feel, however, that our opening 
should stress something other than speech and action. Perhaps 
ours is a story which depends above all on the environment 
shaping the characters. Perhaps a triangle of park at the end 
of a street, or a view of roofs and chimneys, or a clump of trees, 
or a mountain shutting out the sky is the most important factor 
in our story. This, we believe, cannot be adequately expressed 

170 


SPECIAL PARTS OF THE STORY 


171 

in any interchange of speech between one human being and 
another; it demands that our story begin with a description of 
it. Perhaps we are convinced that our story arises from a situa¬ 
tion so involved and having so long a history that the only 
way to set it forth clearly is to recount it at once in a narrative 
which compresses the events of years into a page or two. Per¬ 
haps we even cling to the opinion, in spite of all discouragement, 
that our story embodies some vision of ours of the magnificence 
or the futility, the wild injustice or the inevitable equity of 
human affairs, which must be stated in an introductory essay, 
long or short. If we feel that our artistic salvation hangs upon 
our writing some opening other than the scene upon which we 
have been working, of course we must write that opening; but 
before we do so, let us measure our response to it as readers. 
Let us read a dozen stories with special attention to their open¬ 
ings, asking ourselves how many begin with a presented scene, 
how many with description, how many with recounted action, 
how many with exposition; discussing together with other 
members of our class the appropriateness of each kind of opening 
to its story and its hold on the readers’ interest. Then we may 
want to write a last revision of the beginning of our own story 
in the light of what we have read. 

The angle of vision. — Our story is now begun — well begun, 
we hope; yet, although a good beginning is much, we may call 
it, not half, but perhaps a third done. As we go on to the 
writing of the rest of our story, we realize that the opening has 
given us an impetus which carries us fast and far indeed, but 
which must carry us only in the direction set by the opening, 
and not in any other. The opening has, as we noted before, 
committed us to the key which is to dominate; it has encour¬ 
aged certain expectations in regard to the characters which their 
words and actions throughout may not wantonly violate. In 
still another way does it bind us. Probably, without giving any 


172 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


thought to the matter, we have written our opening in the 
third person. Early in our descriptive writing we discarded the 
I of the first person as awkward and amateurish, and we are 
not likely now to go back to it and to abandon the third person 
to which we have accustomed ourselves. There are, it is true, 
writers who affect the I method, either writers who use the I 
to make plausible an improbable tale or writers of subtle sto¬ 
ries — like those of Henry James, Edith Wharton, Katharine 
Fullerton Gerould — involving a great deal of psychological 
analysis, to which they evidently believe they can give narra¬ 
tive semblance if they allow themselves the right to com¬ 
ment by assuming to be themselves inside the story. 

For these writers, however, as well as for those of us who 
prefer the third person and accept its limitations, the same 
question arises. Who is this person, first or third, through 
whose eyes and ears our story is being seen and heard and 
whose intelligence is recording it? Dare we as authors ascribe 
to ourselves an omniscience that pierces to the heart of every 
character, that sees not only the overt action of every one but 
also the hidden motives that prompt it; that hears not only 
the spoken word of every one but also the unspoken thought? 
To arrogate to oneself this power is not now the fashion in fic¬ 
tion. To-day the writer chooses one angle of vision and holds 
to it consistently throughout his story. He takes some one 
character as recording instrument and reports everything — in¬ 
cident, character, environment — as it appears to this charac¬ 
ter. For this purpose, of course, he will not snatch at any 
character, hit or miss, but he will deliberately select the one 
whose reaction most effectively brings out what is in the story. 
He may decide upon one of the principal characters; he may 
pick out a subordinate character. He may live within the 
mind of this character and experience the story through his 
personality, or he may prefer merely to look over his shoulder. 


SPECIAL PARTS OF THE STORY 


173 


Just at present, the first of these two possibilities is very 
popular. Scarcely a month passes that the magazines do not 
offer it to us in their short stories. The method can be seen 
from the few opening paragraphs of Helen Dore Boylston’s 
“Dawn” in the Atlantic Monthly , July, 1926: 

Barbara felt she could not be blamed for detesting Frank Wallace 
even before she saw him. The Wallace twins lived next door, and 
these stupid fourteen-year-old boys talked of nothing else but Frank 
from morning to night. He hated girls; he could shin up a flagpole, 
using only one hand; he could lick a fellow twice as big as he was; he 
was a “peachy” rider; he was coming to stay a whole week, maybe 
longer. Barbara told her mother she simply wanted to scream every 
time she saw the twins coming. But she never did more than say, 
“Huh — your old Frank 1 ” and walk away haughtily. 

It couldn’t be that she was jealous. She was sure she was not 
of a jealous nature. When the twins boasted that their cousin Frank 
could ride better than any old girl, she didn’t even laugh, though 
the idea was utterly absurd. Why, she had been riding since she was 
a child, and in only seven months she would be sixteen years old. 
Besides, it was ridiculous to say that a boy could do anything better 
than she could. 

He was coming on Monday, and his coming made no difference 
whatever in Barbara’s life. She didn’t even see him. She was very 
busy with her own affairs. 

Tuesday afternoon she glued up a crack in the handle of her 
riding crop, and when it was done she went into the living-room. 
Mother was sitting by the window, sewing, and Barbara stopped to 
look at her, because the sun was shining on her red hair. No other 
girl in the world, Barbara thought, had a mother quite so beautiful 
as hers. Just to look at her sitting there, with her hair shining, and 
that look that wasn’t quite a smile on her face, and the white stuff in 
her lap, made one have a feeling — a warm, happy feeling, yet queer, 
too. 

Mother looked up and saw the riding crop. She said at once, “Oh, 
Barbara, surely you aren’t going to ride this hot afternoon? You’ll 
make yourself sick, dear.” 

Barbara hadn’t thought of riding until that minute, but of course 
she said in a disappointed voice, “Well, Mother, if you’re going to 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


174 

be upset about it — it isn’t hot down by the river, honestly it isn’t; 
it’s shady there. Don’t you think I’m old enough to be trusted to 
take care of myself? ” 

Mother sighed a little, breaking off her thread and knotting.it 
again. “I wish you weren’t such a tomboy, Barbara,” she said. 
Barbara knew that meant she might go, so now she felt that she 
must. She didn’t bother to change into riding breeches. She hadn’t 
really wanted to ride, and everyone was too busy keeping cool to 
notice what she had on. 1 

The same method is used in “Commencement” by Sara Haardt 
in the American Mercury , August, 1926. This story opens: 

From where she was sitting on the left of the stage, Maryellen 
could see the whole family: Papa, in his new blue suit, his forehead 
shining pinkly; Mamma and Aunt Mamie in a whispered confab 
behind Aunt Mamie’s turkey-tail fan; Billie, on the other side of 
Papa, wigwagging his programme at Dick Foster across the aisle, 
his head as sleek as a young seal’s. Mamma looked sweet in her 
changeable silk, the hairs that straggled down from her knot softly 
crimped about her face. Aunt Mamie had seen to all the little details 
that put the finishing touches to their costumes. She might not have 
the means to do things, she always said, but she knew how they 
ought to be done; and so, as she had nothing but time on her hands, 
she could fuss around until she accomplished the little things. Mary¬ 
ellen was named for her — and Mamma — and it was natural she 
should take a special interest in her. Poor Aunt Mamie! She had her 
rhinestone pins in her hair and a tell-tale bloom on her cheeks tonight. 

Mamma was nodding proudly, and Maryellen knew that Aunt 
Mamie had just said her dress was the prettiest of any of the six 
graduates. The other dresses, of course, were much more elaborate, 
the finest that could be bought in Meridian’s ready-to-wear stores, 
but they had what Aunt Mamie called “a set air”: Maryellen looked 
as if she had been melted and poured into hers. Taffeta was always 
good, and Mamma had paid three dollars a yard for the soft, lustrous 
quality that formed the foundation. Over the full skirt Aunt Mamie 
had draped the remnants of real rose-point lace, saved over from 

1 Reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly , July, 1926, by special permission, 
the Atlantic Monthly Company. 


SPECIAL PARTS OF THE STORY 175 

Mamma’s wedding veil. With a little conniving there had been 
enough for the sleeves and the fichu. . . . 

It is a particularly safe method for beginners because, once em¬ 
barked upon it, it is a more difficult matter to leave it than to 
continue consistently with it. 

Many writers, however, do not wish to be imprisoned within 
the shell of any one personality; they prefer looking over the 
character’s shoulder to living inside his mind. This brings us 
back to the purely objective angle of drama, from which most 
of the opening scenes of our group are probably written. This 
discussion will have made us aware that our opening committed 
us to an angle of vision and that we may not depart from it 
without confusing our readers. Even a transition of a sort, 
thrown out as a bridge, will not save us. Readers will no longer 
tolerate, “And now let us take our leave of Amy and see what 
has been happening to Alfred.” No, if we began with Amy, 
with Amy we must continue to the end. 

Movement. — And so we continue to tell our story, using as 
guide the course we mapped out for it in our preliminary state¬ 
ments, yet not hesitating to alter that course if our riper knowl¬ 
edge of our characters suggests another as truer. As we leave 
the opening behind us, our pace becomes brisker. Especially 
when we reach a scene like the climax, we find conversation 
and action pushing forward, shaking off much of their accompan¬ 
iment of descriptive detail. This increase in speed of move¬ 
ment runs parallel with an increase in intensity. The pull of the 
forces in the struggle becomes stronger; passions rise. As 
authors we do nothing to clog the movement. We let it drive 
forward. 

Accident and coincidence. — When we arrive at the turning- 
point, we are careful to make it significant, but we refuse to let 
our anxiety to emphasize the direction of the action mislead us 
into reenforcing it by importing into the story anything alien 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


176 

to it. This is the point at which some writers, conscious that 
the falling action which they have planned now seems feeble, 
try to bolster it up by dragging in accident and coincidence. To 
awaken the dormant love in the heart of a selfish mother, they 
make the unwanted child fall desperately ill — or fall from the 
nursery window. To bring the crabbed old misanthrope in 
contact with the Christmas spirit, they fling him down a flight 
of stairs and bowl him into a ragged youngster at the bottom. 
Their judge or their governor, adamant to pleas for mercy, 
discovers that the prisoner who is suing for clemency is his own 
wayward, long-lost son. 

Once our story has passed its peak and is on the downward 
slope, we may have to check its tendency toward a too pre¬ 
cipitous dive to the ending. The reader does not, of course, 
wish us to delay the outcome unduly; but neither does he wish 
to be jolted along so breathlessly that he has reason to suspect 
our own interest in our story has evaporated and our eye is set 
longingly on the last word. 

The ending. — The ending itself brings us much the same 
problems of technique as the opening. Shall we bring our story 
to a close with the scene that presents the catastrophe, just as we 
may have opened it with the scene that gave the first hint of the 
struggle? Or shall we add to this a descriptive passage, as we 
may have prefaced the initial incident with description, leaving 
with the reader a picture that will remain with him as an ade¬ 
quate, a memorable ending of the story — Father and Mother 
Penn on the doorstep of the barn with the peaceful evening land¬ 
scape spread before them; the farmer and his wife riding home 
happily from the market town, the glare of the sun softened 
to a sunset light, the heavy baby asleep on the bottom of the 
wagon; a little boy swinging his heels on a gate-post, treasuring 
in the pocket of his blue jacket a white envelope with a red 
stamp? Even if we began, however, with an account of events 


SPECIAL PARTS OF THE STORY 


177 


preceding the story, it is to be hoped that we shall be able to 
deny ourselves any satisfaction that may come from end¬ 
ing by tidily disposing of the future of the characters. 
Above all, if we opened, in spite of all that could be done and 
said, with an expository overture, and our sense of symmetry 
demands that we now close with similar comment, may it be in 
matter not too obvious and in tone neither too moralistic nor 
too world-weary and cynical. Before we actually finish our 
story, it may be well to make a study of the endings of some 
dozen stories that we have liked, weighing the relative merits of 
different methods of closing, and arriving at a standard of 
interest and effectiveness that shall govern our own writing. 

Indeed, throughout our writing, we have been reading short 
stories, and what little has been given by way of precept has 
been set down only that we may know what questions to ask of 
the short-story writers to whom we have been going for our real 
guidance. 

In a course like this, not in any way a special course in the 
short story but a more general course in description and narra¬ 
tion, it is possible that students may not have the time to write 
a complete short story. In that case, they may write the 
opening scene, the climax, and the catastrophe, with possibly 
the turning-point, omitting the stretches of action, long or short, 
which would connect these in the finished story. The entire 
story, of course, they work out in their minds, or they would not 
be able to set parts of it on paper. 

The title. — There remains only the title. Possibly an ap¬ 
propriate title has already been suggested by this or that in the 
story. It may be that the principal character so stands out that 
the story must bear this name and no other. The table of 
contents of the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1924 
reveals such a title, “ Margaret Blake,” and others in which the 
principal character figures, either figuratively as in “ Rachel 


i 7 8 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


and Her Children” and “Uriah’s Son,” or in combination with a 
statement of the theme of the story as in “Professor Boynton 
Rereads History.” The theme of the story or some comment 
upon it may stand alone as title as in “The Spring Flight,” 
“The Most Dangerous Game,” “The Secret at the Cross¬ 
roads,” “The Tie That Binds,” “What Do You Mean — Ameri¬ 
cans? ” “One Uses the Handkerchief,” “Progress.” There may 
be a suggestion of place as in “The Secret at the Crossroads.” 
An article of importance in the story may give it its title, as 
“The Amethyst Comb” or “The Menorah.” 

Do we, as readers, find all these titles equally successful in 
winning our interest and inducing us to turn to the stories and 
read them? Do we fancy a title like “Progress,” or does it 
sound too much like the heading of an article? Do we enjoy 
a sentence title like “What Do You Mean — Americans?” 
or “One Uses the Handkerchief”? Does a figurative title like 
“The Spring Flight” appeal to our imagination? Do the allu¬ 
sions in such titles as “Rachel and Her Children” and “Uriah’s 
Son” throw a light upon the story for us? We may scrutinize 
lists of story titles and study their effect on us and their bearing 
on the stories before we decide upon a title for our story. 

In all our work with the short story we have said nothing 
about ingenuity of plot and surprise endings. We have re¬ 
garded the short story, not as a toy or a trick, but as a piece of 
literature, to be taken as seriously as any other work of art, 
novel or drama, and to be judged by its fidelity to life as its 
writer sees life and by its practice of the special art form which 
its writer has chosen. 


CHAPTER XVIII 


A VACATION FROM REALISM 

Thus far we have held fast to the realities of life. What our 
eyes have not seen, our pencils have not put upon paper. Yet 
life is not wholly a matter of getting up in the morning, doing the 
day’s work, and going to bed at night. There are dreams. The 
world that we see about us may seem at times a most unsatis¬ 
factory place. Well, it is possible to escape from it to a world 
where everything happens as we desire it to happen. In this 
world, the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong; men 
are brave and women are beautiful. The wind blows from the 
fields of romance. 

Historical romance. — Where shall we go questing for this 
world? Some have sought it in the past. They have written of 
D’Artagnan, of Ivanhoe and Richard Coeur deLion and Saladin, 
of Colonel Esmond. This world of the past has, however, a 
wealth of ascertainable detail that holds off the writer whose 
hours are filled with scheduled tasks and who cannot quite 
abandon the world he fives in with all its time-consuming duties 
and make himself citizen, say, of the London of Queen Anne’s 
time, as Thackeray did, ruffling in its coffee-houses and taverns, 
rapping out its oaths, eating its venison pasties and its par¬ 
tridges. As much research goes to the atmosphere of a thrilling 
historical romance as into the writing of a thesis in history. 
Maurice Hewlett was a scholar as well as a romancer; Jeffrey 
Farnol, though he may be guilty of an occasional inaccuracy, 
knows more concrete details about the fife of the early England 
of the Edwards and the later England of the Prince Regent 

179 


180 imaginative writing 

than a college student is likely to accumulate in his courses in 
the scientific study of history. 

Tales of the occult. — Some writers seek escape from the too 
too solid things of a daylight world in the moonlight of the 
supernatural or the twilight borderland of illusion and hallu¬ 
cination. Many inexperienced writers turn in this direction, so 
eager to be of the fellowship of Edgar Allan Poe and his suc¬ 
cessors that they ignore the fact that this unsubstantial world 
also has a very exacting realism of its own. Without any 
knowledge of abnormal psychology, they attempt to create the 
fantastic visions of a disordered imagination. Fascinated by 
tales of the mysterious, they do not realize that these tales have 
the power to fascinate by reason of their author’s knowledge of 
details, scientifically realistic within their eery limits. Arthur 
Machen, for one, is an adept in demonology and other cabalis¬ 
tic lore. Yet this ghostly — often ghastly — romance has an 
irresistible attraction for many a youthful writer concerning 
whom one certainly need not cry: 

Beware! Beware! 

His flashing eyes, his floating hair! 

Weave a circle round him thrice, 

And close your eyes with holy dread, 

For he on honey-dew hath fed, 

And drunk the milk of Paradise. 

Fairy and folk stories. — In the world of fancy are there, 
then, no marvels that the young writer may bring home to us 
with the insistence of successful art? There is a realm of white 
magic, the homeland of fairies, elves, pixies, brownies, lep¬ 
rechauns, kobolds, and the like. Its historians have been 
Charles Perrault, the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Ander¬ 
sen. Andrew Lang and Joseph Jacobs have been scholars of its 
annals. If these savants and men of letters were not ashamed 
to be young enough in spirit to treasure the fairy tale, surely 


A VACATION FROM REALISM 


181 


we cannot lightly call it childish. And, although for generations 
there has been ransacking of every nook and corner, material 
still remains for those who will look for it. Of course, what 
these writers have done, or what Selma Lagerlof has done with 
the folk lore of Sweden, is, in more ways than one, beyond the 
reach of the undergraduate student. 

Source of material. — But here and there in the memory of 
most are trifles unconsidered until now. If they have not found 
their way into print, perhaps we may put them there. Perhaps, 
as children, we have heard again and again, from mother or 
grandmother or nurse, Irish stories such as Seumas MacManus 
and Ruth Sawyer have written down in books; perhaps the 
tales were not Irish, but Bohemian or Serbian or Russian. 
Perhaps we have known some such story teller as Uncle Remus 
or listened in some lumber-jacks’ camp to yarns about Paul 
Bunyan. Perhaps our reading has led us down unfrequented 
by-paths, and we are acquainted with ancient legends from 
Talmud and Midrash or from the literature of the Church 
Fathers. Or if chance has not led us to treasure-trove such as 
any of these, we may retell fairy tales that are not so recondite, 
as Howard and Katharine Pyle have done, rendering the old 
stories in a new way. Or we may steep our minds in the wonders 
of this other world until our imagination refashions them in 
marvels of its own, like Lord Dunsany’s strange tales or the 
more homely stories, lightened with human laughter, of James 
Stephens. 

Sense of the familiar. — We find that most of these stories 
are amphibious: they partake of the nature of both worlds — 
the world of dream and the world of reality. Perhaps the same 
story teller’s instinct that made Defoe particularize the scoured 
striped silk gown worn by the apparition of Mrs. Veal also makes 
Red Ridinghood have a pat of familiar, everyday butter in her 
basket when she meets the wolf. In these tales the familiar 


i 82 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


mingles with the marvelous. Children are here, and the human 
relationships of father and son, brother and sister, bridegroom 
and bride. Parents long for a child; youth seeks a mate. 
Fairy-tale people sleep under the accustomed shelter of a roof, 
whether of king’s palace or of goatherd’s hovel. Fairy-tale 
people wear clothes, the rags of Cinderella slaving in the ashes 
of the hearth or the beautiful gowns of Cinderella dancing in 
the palace. Fairy-tale people eat the peasant’s black bread or 
the prince’s sugar-bread. 

Sense of the marvelous. — But this familiar world is trans¬ 
figured into a world of magic and wonder. The child strays from 
human habitation to the home of the bears or the dwarfs or the 
witch. Instead of the straw roof of the woodcutter’s hut, she 
sees the gingerbread roof and the candy window-panes of the 
witch’s dwelling. It is a world of mystic commands that must 
not be transgressed, of incantations and transformations. 
Magic sleep falls upon princess and page-boy. Talismans open 
gates of brass. Wishes come true. 

Poetic justice. — It is a world of poetic justice, of readjust¬ 
ment of the galling inequalities of life. The poor brother 
triumphs; the rich is foiled. The youngest son, neglected and 
despised, answers the riddles, accomplishes the task, and wins 
the princess; the folly of the fool proves better than the wis¬ 
dom of the wise; the ill-treated drudge weds the prince. Virtue 
is rewarded; the industrious daughter is showered with gold; 
the girl of pleasant speech drops pearls and diamonds from her 
kindly lips. 

Symmetry of structure. — If we are to bring to our readers 
tales that shall open magic casements, we must fashion them 
with care. We can make no greater mistake than to think that 
these tales are easy to write. No matter how rich they may be 
in detail, they must have an absolute singleness of effect. Often 
this is achieved by a rigid symmetry of structure. Little Half 


A VACATION FROM REALISM 


183 


Chick sets out to go to Madrid and to meet his fate. On his 
way to Madrid and up the ladder of his destiny he callously 
hoppity-skips away from three things in distress, — the water 
choked with weeds, the fire dying for want of air, the breeze 
caught in the branches of a tree. He reaches the king’s palace 
and the summit of his destiny. In his fall from high estate, he 
is thrice rebuffed by the things that he has spurned — the water 
that rises in the pot until it covers him, the fire that burns hot 
and hotter until it scorches him to a crisp, the wind that whirls 
him through the air and sticks him on the point of the steeple, 
there to stay forever to tell which way the wind blows. It has 
the closing in of inevitable fate of a Greek tragedy. And this is 
the pattern on which many of the tales are built. 

Parallelism. — If the structure has not this perfect symmetry 
of the whole, it usually has a lesser symmetry of parts. Episode 
is followed by similar parallel episode. The little Gingerbread 
Man runs away from a little old woman and a little old man; 
he runs away from a horse; he runs away from a cow; he runs 
away from a barn full of threshers; he runs away from a field 
full of mowers. Epaminondas brings butter home from his 
Auntie, which he puts in his hat and which melts and runs all 
over him; and so his Mammy tells him he should have cooled 
it in the brook all the way home. He brings a little puppy-dog 
home from his Auntie, which he cools in the brook all the way 
home and which is dead when he takes it to his Mammy; and 
so she tells him he should have tied it on the end of a string and 
led it along the road all the way home. He brings a loaf of bread 
home from his Auntie, which he ties on the end of a string and 
pulls along the road all the way home and which is good for 
nothing when his Mammy sees it. 

Repetition. — This, symmetry of structure is emphasized by 
repetition. Each time Epaminondas confronts his Mammy, 
she cries, “ Epaminondas, Epaminondas, you ain’t got the 


184 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


sense you was born with”; and when his folly exasperates her 
beyond endurance, she adds, “You never did have the sense 
you was born with; you never will have the sense you was born 
with.” Little Half Chick answers each of his petitioners with 
the same identical words: “The idea! I can’t be bothered 
with you! I’m off to Madrid to see the king.” The little 
Gingerbread Man taunts each of his pursuers with a jingle that 
grows with each triumph, until at last it becomes: 

I have run away from a little old woman, 

A little old man, 

A cow, 

A horse, 

A barn full of threshers, 

A field full of mowers, 

And I can run away from you, I can! 

Run! Run! as fast as you can! 

You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man ! 1 

And each time the story teller follows the jingle with the words, 
“And they couldn’t catch him.” 

So in stories written in these latter days in the manner of the 
old tales, we retain this symmetry and this repetition. In 
The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde, the little Swallow stays 
with the Prince one night to carry the ruby from the Prince’s 
sword-hilt to the poor mother of the fever-stricken boy; he 
stays a second night to pluck out one of the Prince’s sapphire 
eyes and to take it to the student starving in his garret; he 
stays a third night to slip the other sapphire eye into the hand of 
the little match-girl. Each night the Prince says, “Swallow, 
Swallow, little Swallow, will you not stay with me one night 
longer? ” 

Concreteness. — Oscar Wilde, although he has, of course, a 
tendency to elaborate over-much, has the older story-tellers’ 

1 Stories to Tell to Children , Sara Cone Bryant. Houghton Mifflin. 


A VACATION FROM REALISM 


185 


delight in the beauty of things. He has especially their feeling 
for color. His Happy Prince is “gilded all over with thin leaves 
of fine gold.” The Charity Children come out of the cathedral 
in “bright scarlet cloaks” and “clean white pinafores.” The 
Swallow tells the Prince of a King in Egypt in a painted coffin, 
“wrapped in yellow linen,” with a “chain of pale green jade” 
round his throat; of “yellow lions” with “eyes like green 
beryls”; of a ruby “redder than a red rose” and of sapphires 
“as blue as the great sea”; of “red ibises”; of “the King of 
the Mountains of the Moon, who is as black as ebony”; of 
“the great green snake that sleeps in a palm-tree.” When the 
snow and the frost come, Wilde paints this picture: “The streets 
looked as if they were made of silver, they were so bright and 
glistening; long icicles like crystal daggers hung down from 
the eaves of the houses; everybody went about in furs, and the 
little boys wore scarlet caps and skated on the ice.” 1 

Not only color, but also sound, smell, and taste our story 
must have. Picture after picture it must make with its words. 
Its names of prince and goose-girl must have a music to conjure 
up atmosphere. Its rhythm must flow like water with the fre¬ 
quent and of childlike story-telling. 

Preliminary reports and exercises. — Before we write a fan¬ 
tastic tale of our own, we should do what we can to stimulate 
our imagination and to induce in ourselves a mood in which 
we may capture the charm of this kind of story. Members of a 
class may each select and report on a story teller or a type of 
story, such as stories about the animals of the meadow or the 
jungle, how and why stories like the Just So Stories of Rudyard 
Kipling, oriental tales like the Arabian Nights , English tales, 
Irish, Scandinavian, and so on. Or, better, different groups may 
work on the story themes common to the fairy tale, such as the 

1 The Happy Prince , and Other Fairy Tales , Oscar Wilde. G. P. Put¬ 
nam’s Sons. 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


186 

quest, the talisman, transformation, parted lovers reunited, 
and so on; on the characters of the fairy tale world; on sym¬ 
metry and parallelism; on the use of repetition; on the forms 
that the refrain may take; on the wealth of sense impressions 
in the fairy tale; on rhythm of sentence and music of word in 
the fairy tale. Then we shall be ready to write our own fairy 
story; but before we go far with it, we may like to bring to 
class for constructive criticism, first, a summary of our plot 
and then our opening scene. 

Notice in the following story the student’s attempt to give 
the marvelous the homeliness of the familiar; to construct a 
plot with a series of similar episodes, their likeness accentuated 
by repetition; to set the story in a solid world of concrete detail; 
to make the story move to the music of fitting word and 
rhythm. 


Ivan the Luckless 1 
By Pauline Horwitt 

When we were little children, we would cuddle about our 
mother on a winter’s evening, while the wind heaped up the 
soft white snow against the window, and the logs hissed and 
roared in the big brick oven of our Russian home, and the wind 
went moaning in the chimney; and we would call clamorously, 
“A story, Mother, a story.” Rare old stories Mother used to 
tell us, about witches, and hobgoblins, and wolves, and bears, 
until we would fear to look at the window lest we should see 
two fiery eyes gleaming from the dark, phantom-like trees. 
Yet of all those stories, this one alone has remained in my 
memory. My great-grandmother told it to my grandmother, 
my grandmother told it to my mother, and my mother told it 
to me. 


1 Hunter College Echo. 


A VACATION FROM REALISM 


187 

It was on an autumn night, a long, long time ago, that an 
old beggar and his son Ivan were wandering through our Rus¬ 
sian woods. They had been told in their northern village that 
in the city there was bread a-plenty, and gold to be had for 
the asking. “Ah,” thought father and son, “if only we could 
get to the city, then all would be well with us”; but now it was 
days and days since they had come across a village, nay, since 
they had met a human b,eing, and their provisions were running 
low; they had but one small loaf of black bread. 

“My son,” said the beggar, “there seems to be no way out 
of this trackless forest. We cannot help each other, and soon 
we shall have to give up; let us try our fortunes separately.” 

Then and there they broke their loaf of bread in two, wished 
each other the good fortune of reaching the city, and struck into 
different trails. 

For a long, long time Ivan plodded on wearily through the 
woods. Brambles tore his feet, spiders’ webs stuck to his face; 
sometimes a gray log under a bush struck terror to his heart from 
its very likeness to the bushy tail of the stealthy fox, and some¬ 
times the breaking of a twig made him look around fearfully, 
fully expecting to see the glaring eyes of a lean, skulking wolf; 
and when a rabbit started from a bush, his heart ceased to 
beat, and he stood dazed till long after the frightened rabbit 
had scurried across his path. Soon, however, he noticed that 
the trees were getting thinner and at times rays of light pene¬ 
trated through the long vistas, and played on the hoary tree- 
trunks, and made the crimson leaves of the birch flame in 
sombre color; and as he walked on with quickened steps he 
caught sight of patches of rosy sky through the dense foliage. 

Ivan’s heart beat with fear lest this should prove only another 
disappointment. Perhaps it was only a clearing! But as he 
emerged, he saw before him a wide dun-colored morass stretch¬ 
ing as far — as far as eye could see, and beyond it the big red 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


188 

sun sinking behind a clump of trees at its edge. Ivan fell on his 
knees and gave thanks, and then sat down to munch his bread. 

After he had rested for some time, he started across the 
morass. The air had grown blue, and dragon-flies flew by, 
flapping their wings against his face. A bull-frog croaked at 
his feet, and a whole chorus of frogs took up the cry all over the 
morass. Poor Ivan was beginning to feel as disheartened with 
the moor as he had been with the forest, but soon he caught 
sight of a little light shining in the distant clump of trees. 

He made his way through the swamp toward the glimmering 
light. At every step his feet sank in the mud and he no sooner 
drew one foot out, than “soomp,” the other one sank. At last, 
wet and tired, he reached the light. But it did not come from 
a house. What he saw was but a tumble-down mill, and the 
ruins looked ghastly in the flickering of the torch. Ivan caught 
sight of a large sieve suspended between two beams, and he 
climbed into it and fell fast asleep. 

Toward midnight he awoke with a start. There were sounds 
of laughter and talking. He peered through the sieve; for a 
time he was dazzled by the glare of a bon-fire, which, as it 
flared up, illumined a strange array of silver flagons and tank¬ 
ards and beakers, and made ponderous silver forks and spoons 
send out beams of light; his eyes were held fascinated by the 
gleam of many shining knives. Gradually the sound of voices 
gained on his ears. His eyes slowly became unriveted from the 
glittering hoard and traveled to the grim and swarthy faces, 
rendered more fierce and more mysterious in the red glare of 
the fire. He saw their mouths move and then, with a start, he 
seemed to awake, and the full meaning of their speech dawned 
upon him; they were a band of robbers discussing a plan for a 
raid on the neighboring village. Ivan held his breath in fear. 
His nose beg^n to itch, but he was afraid to stir. He felt he 
was going to sneeze; he tried to stifle it, but too late. He had 


A VACATION FROM REALISM 189 

sneezed. For a moment there was silence among the band and 
then one robber cried: 

“Ho, brother, there’s some one here!” and they ran to the 
sieve and dragged him forth. 

“You’ve heard all we said?” 

“Yes,” murmured the boy in a trembling voice. 

“Let’s hang him.” 

“No, drown him.” 

“Oh, no, let’s bind him to a tree and leave him to starve in 
the forest.” 

And they were about to drag him off, when the chief of the 
band said, “Let’s take him to help on the raid.” 

It was a capital idea. The chief turned to Ivan with un¬ 
sheathed sword. 

“If you come with us and help us on this raid, and obey all 
orders, we’ll adopt you into the band. If not, we’ll kill you. 
Choose.” 

“I’ll go,” sobbed Ivan. 

The robbers blindfolded him and led him over hill and down 
dale; once they stopped in a wood and the leader commanded 
the young men to hew down saplings. They cut some young 
oaks and trimmed them and started again on their way. When 
they emerged from the wood, a halt was ordered. Some one 
unbound Ivan’s eyes. He saw a sleeping village lying before 
them. With stealthy steps the band approached the village 
storehouse, for in olden times, you know, the peasants had 
no ice-boxes or storage houses like those we have to-day, and 
they used to dig a deep cellar in the earth, cover it with a small 
wooden shed, and keep all their good things in this one store¬ 
house. The thieves slipped the poles under the shed and after 
some difficulty managed to raise it a few inches. 

“Get in there and hand out everything you find,” they com¬ 
manded Ivan. 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


190 

The boy crept into the cellar, and then by the light of a 
candle began to hand out the precious stores. There were 
cakes of nice yellow butter that the peasant wives had been 
preparing for the winter, and big earthern-ware jars of rich 
cream in the process of getting sour, and fine white flat cheeses. 
There were big rolls of heavy linen that the peasant girls had 
bleached by the brook, and rolls and rolls of bright red and 
green and yellow-checkered cloth that the village damsels had 
spun and stored away for their dower. 

“Is that all?” called the robbers at last. 

“That’s all,” said Ivan, “except a pot of ashes,” and he 
turned to reach for that. 

Ivan heard a scraping sound, and then a thump, as the shed 
struck the earth. He lit a match, only to see that the robbers 
had pulled out the levers, and he was a prisoner in the empty 
shed. He called to them; he cried, but they only laughed in 
answer, and soon he heard their footsteps die away in the night. 
He sat down on the pot of ashes and waited. He knew it 
was morning when a cock began to crow; and later a dog began 
to bark, and other dogs all over the village barked in answer. 
After a while he heard a door open, and then the pulleys of the 
well began to creak. Ivan’s fear increased with every moment. 
They’d surely kill him if they found him there in the empty 
pantry. Then footsteps approached and keys clinked as some 
housewife fumbled at the door. Quick as thought Ivan flung 
a handful of ashes at her face, and, brushing past her, he ran. 

He ran, and he ran, and he ran, until he couldn’t run any 
more. 

For some time he heard the cries of men and the barking of 
dogs in pursuit, but they were far behind, because it took a 
long time for the woman to rub the ashes from her eyes, and 
then a longer time to gather her wits, see what had happened, 
and arouse the village. 


A VACATION FROM REALISM 


IQI 


And still he ran on. Toward noon he came to a wide field 
where peasants were reaping, and peasant women with their 
bright kerchiefs tied jauntily behind their heads, and their aprons 
tucked under at either side, were walking behind them, gather¬ 
ing the sheaves, and with deft fingers tying up the stacks of 
rye. 

Ivan watched the gleaming scythes flash with a “sshk-sshk,” 
and then the yellow stalks fall. He listened to the peasant 
girls singing merrily a harvest song, but he was hungry. Soon 
he saw a young woman go to her baby, who was sleeping 
at one side, and begin to rock the cradle. Ivan approached her. 

“Please may I have something to eat? I’m so hungry.” 

The woman looked at his tired face and eager eyes, and then 
at her chubby baby; then she took out a couple of baked pota¬ 
toes and gave them to him. 

“That’s all I have now, my boy, but if you’ll go home with 
me soon I’ll give you some more, and if you’ll mind my baby 
I’ll always keep you and feed you well.” 

Ivan sat down and rocked the baby. Later, when the sun was 
low in the heavens, they all went home and took him along. It 
was long since Ivan had tasted such a fine dinner! They gave 
him a big ear then-ware bowl of nice flaky mashed potatoes, 
with one of those yellow wooden spoons, like those grandma 
used to have, and a big bowlful of steaming “kapusta” — that’s 
cabbage soup, the peasants’ favorite dish, you know; and they 
gave him a great big crust of brown bread with a pinch of blessed 
salt. 

After dinner the peasant woman told Ivan to sit down on the 
stove, for in olden times, you know, they had big brick ovens 
like — like — let’s see, — like a giraffe. The fire was at what 
would be the knees of the giraffe’s forelegs. The chimney would 
be the giraffe’s neck and head, and the part that corresponds to 
the giraffe’s back was used as a couch. And a fine couch it was, 


192 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


rather hard, but nice and warm, so that you could comfortably 
bake your calves and take a fine nap. Well, she told Ivan to 
sit on the stove, lean against the distaff that stood at the side, 
and take the baby in his lap, and then she went away to the 
field. Ivan sat, and sat, and sat, and the baby slept on his lap. 

He stared at the little diamond-paned window, which was 
fly-stained and broken, so that a little pillow was stuffed in the 
hole to keep the air out; he stared at the earthen floor where 
the yellow sand was sprinkled; at the copper samovar in the 
corner, which was sending a long ray of dull light from the 
burnished surface, and at the picture over the pallet, a gaudy, 
gilt-framed picture of the Czar, with his gleaming epaulets and 
medals, and shining crown. It was so nice, and quiet, and 
drowsy! Only the chubby baby was heavy. Through half-shut 
eyes Ivan looked at the smoke-begrimed rafters on the ceiling, 
and watched the flies crawling along. He wondered why they 
didn’t fall off, and then, — and then he dozed. 

There was a thump and a crash! Ivan opened his eyes 
sleepily — there lay the baby on the floor and the distaff on top 
of her. 

In a moment he was awake. Off the stove he jumped, and 
without stopping to look at the baby, he ran, and he ran, and 
he ran, until he couldn’t run any more. Over hill he ran, 
and down dale, and through woods and past stubbly wheat 
fields, vowing that if he ever came again to a village, and if a 
woman offered to give him shelter, it should be a woman with¬ 
out a baby, for he’d rather starve than mind another baby. 

At last, when the sun had set, and dark shadows settled down 
over the field, he saw the fights of a village glimmering and 
twinkling in the distance. At the outskirts of the village he 
came to a little house separated from the rest, a little house 
made of rough-hewn logs with moss stuffed in between to keep 
the wind out, and with an old straw-thatched roof projecting on 


A VACATION FROM REALISM 


193 


all sides like a stiff night-cap. Ivan could hear little piggies 
grunting in the sty, and an occasional cackle and sleepy cluck 
from the hen as she lost her balance on the roost. He looked 
in through the little diamond-paned window, and, seeing no 
children, he lifted the latch and walked into the house. 

A kindly old couple lived in this house, and they gave him 
some bread and clear water from the neighboring well, and they 
promised to keep him as their own. 

But after supper the peasant woman was taken suddenly ill. 
Someone had to go fetch the Old Wise Woman of the village, for 
in olden times, you know, there were no doctors, and the oldest 
woman in the village did all the curing and killing. She had all 
kinds of dried herbs, and toadstools, and dried snakes. She 
could say a charm to drive away the toothache, and another 
one to stop bleeding when little girls cut their fingers, and a 
hundred and one charms to drive away the Evil One. She was 
a very important personage in the village, more important 
even than the priest. 

But who was to go to fetch her? The peasant couldn’t leave 
his wife alone in pain. Ivan did not know where she was to 
be found. 

“Go, my son,” said the peasant. “You’ll find her soon 
enough. She fives in the last house at the other end of the 
village.” 

And Ivan went. 

He found her house and persuaded her to come, but the Old 
Wise Woman was very, very old, and she couldn’t walk. If any 
one was in need of her priceless services, why, then he had to 
carry her. So Ivan took her on his back and began to carry her. 
But oh, she was terribly heavy. He trudged along bravely, 
bent under her weight. At every two steps he stopped to rest her 
on the fence, and he straightened his poor, tired back. But 
soon he came to the part of the village where there were no 


194 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


more fences; his back was almost breaking in two. At last he 
came to a well, and rested her on the edge. But as luck would 
have it, the foolish Old Wise Woman fidgeted about, and plump, 
she fell into the well! 

Poor Ivan was in despair. If he should go back to the peasant 
he would be whipped for not bringing the Old Wise Woman. If 
he should go back to the village he would be killed for drowning 
the precious Old Wise Woman. So he ran. 

And he ran, and he ran, and he ran, until he couldn’t run any 
more. Once again he was in a swamp. He pulled one foot out of 
the mud and “soomp,” the other one went in, and when he 
pulled that one; out, “soomp,” the other one sank. Again the 
frogs croaked, and now the man in the moon followed him 
wherever he went. Again he saw a light glimmering in the 
distance and he made his way toward it. He was at the ruined 
mill again, but this time the robbers were already there, and 
they caught sight of him before he could hide. 

“Aha,” they cried, “you alive yet? We’ll fix you.” 

They took an empty wine cask and threw him in and nailed 
it up. 

“Now, my fine fellow,” they laughed, “see if you can escape 
us this time,” and they went away. 

Poor Ivan cried and cried. He reviewed his whole life and he 
thought of that far away northern village which he had left to go 
to the city. That wonderful city — and he would never be able 
to see it. 

Soon he heard a heavy, rolling tread. A big black bear was 
coming toward him. The bear sniffed at the barrel — he smelled 
something good. Around and around the barrel he went, but 
there was no way of getting at that something good. At last he 
spied a hole and tried to put his nozzle in. Ivan’s heart leaped 
with terror. But the bear’s nozzle couldn’t go in; the hole was 
too small. Then the bear sat down to think, for bears can think, 


A VACATION FROM REALISM 195 

you know. Then he got an idea. He walked over to the barrel 
and put his tail in through the hole. 

Ivan grabbed hold of the tail. This time it was the bear that 
started in terror; and he ran, dragging the barrel after him. 

And he ran, and he ran, and he ran. Through the woods he 
went, but Ivan held on to the tail, and the cask went bumping 
along. Over hills he ran, and the terrible cask caught at his legs. 
Through valleys he ran, and still more terrified he grew, and 
still Ivan held on to the tail. The poor bear was at his wits’ 
end — it’s no joke to have an innocent-looking barrel get hold 
of your tail and get suddenly attached to you. So he ran, and 
the faster he ran the faster it followed. The bear grew furious, 
and in his despair he turned to the lair of his wise enemies — 
to the city. Along the highway he ran to the city, with the 
barrel rolling after him. Into the city he came, and as the 
much-shaken barrel struck the sharp cobblestones it split into 
a thousand splinters, and Ivan found himself standing, some¬ 
what dazed, to be sure, in the middle of the city street. 

And as for the bear — the strain on his tail was too much. 
He left it in Ivan’s hands. By the way, that’s how the bear lost 
his tail, and he’s never had one since. 


CHAPTER XIX 

THE ONE-ACT PLAY 


Short story and one-act play. — When we were writing fiction 
in the form of the realistic short story and, through this writing 
and through our reading and our analysis of our reading, learn¬ 
ing something about how the short story is written, we so 
emphasized its analogy to drama that, if we recall that analysis 
and practice, we may apply it now with equal force to the one- 
act play. 

Originating in struggle. — Our short story originated in 
struggle; so does our one-act play. As we go over in our mind 
one-act plays that we have seen or read, we remember the 
struggle of an unattractive, unloved little waif to make herself 
seem desired and desirable; the struggle of an old woman with¬ 
out menfolk in the war to establish herself as a patriotic 
British subject by begging, borrowing, or stealing a soldier; 
the struggle between a woman's clodlike immobility and the 
insults and injuries that goad her to a moment of passion; the 
struggle between a mother's agonized longing for some little 
luxuries for her baby and her husband's high sense of honor in 
his tragic losing fight to win even the barest necessities; be¬ 
tween a girl's independence and a man’s smug condescension; 
between the desire of two old women to see a great actress and 
their feeling that it would be extravagant and wicked; between 
the mother who would choose one way of life for her children 
and the children who would choose another; between the 
square peg and the round hole; between the gleaming vision 
and the disappointing fulfilment. 

Limited by what we know of life. — Our realistic short story 
was limited to what we really knew about life. We chose an 

196 


THE ONE-ACT PLAY 


197 


environment that we knew and people that we knew, and our 
story grew in accordance with what we knew of life. So it is 
with the realistic play. Again, as play after play comes to mind, 
can we doubt Eugene O’Neill’s knowledge of ships and sailors, 
or John Synge’s of Irish country folk, or Susan Glaspell’s or 
Zona Gale’s of the characters in such plays as “Trifles” and 
“ Neighbors”? 

Limited by the possibilities of the playhouse. — Just as the 
manner of our story was determined, moreover, by the method 
of fiction, so is the manner of our play determined by the 
possibilities of the playhouse. To be a play, a story must be so 
constructed as to be presented by actors, on a stage, before an 
audience. It is to be acted rather than to be read; or, if it is 
read, then by a reader who stages and acts the play in the 
theater of his mind. The playwright is limited, then, to a story 
that can be made intelligible and interesting by being acted. 
Whatever the audience does not see and hear, it cannot know. 
The story is not told, but shown through movements and sounds. 

Limited to one setting and to one time. — To this require¬ 
ment, which conditions all drama, full-length as well as one-act, 
must be added the demands peculiar to the one-act play. It 
is limited to one scene and to a time that is continuous. Some 
playwrights, it is true, permit themselves the device of dropping 
the curtain in a one-act play to suggest a lapse of time, but the 
interval thus indicated must be short, no more than a couple of 
hours, or it will not convince an audience. Some look askance 
at this practice and demand an unbroken sequence of time in 
the unchanging setting. But whether the curtain falls or not, 
all are agreed that the one-act play, like the short story, must 
have singleness of effect. Within its narrow space it cannot 
afford to wander; it must have insistent unity. 

Sources of play ideas. — The idea of a play, like the idea of a 
story, may spring from anything. We may be interested in a 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


198 

character and we may construct a play that will exhibit him in 
his most characteristic guise, as show-off, as grumpy old man, 
as sanctimonious hypocrite, as dreamer. We may be interested 
in an environment — a village post office, a neighborhood store, 
a roof where women come to hang out the clothes, — and we 
may supply it with characters and an action that will show its 
social implications. We may be interested in an idea and we 
may embody it in a concrete objective manifestation. This, 
however, is usually difficult. What begins as an abstraction often 
persists in remaining an abstraction to the end and resisting all 
our attempts to give it “a local habitation and a name.” One 
student in a group wished to give dramatic form to the conflict 
between her earlier anticipations of the measureless vistas of 
college life and her later conviction that it had nothing to offer 
but cramped horizons. What she wrote was merely argument 
in the form of duologue: one speaker, who, for all the personality 
she had, may be called A, wordily disputed the matter with a 
woman of straw who may be called B and whom she easily 
silenced, the duologue then becoming a monologue. Another 
student thought that she wanted to build a play upon her 
horror of religious prejudice, but what she had planned was only 
an essay, a monologue with a moment of dramatic incident as 
its spring-board. 

Genesis of a play. — A student felt that there was material 
for a play in a neighborhood shop which she knew very well, a 
shoe-store which served a little community as distinct in itself 
from the rest of the city as a small town. One of the salesmen 
was a young fellow who worked in the store to pay his way 
through the evening course in a law school. He seemed an 
attractive boy, shy yet wistfully eager for companionship, his 
days too taken up with his double life as wage earner and stu¬ 
dent to leave him time to live as just a young man. Another 
clerk was an old German with an irascible manner and a sen- 


THE ONE-ACT PLAY 199 

tentious utterance, who assumed the right to give every one 
the benefit of his advice. 

Thus far the prospective playwright had setting and charac¬ 
ters, but no plot. Had she in mind a drama of drab or somber 
tone? No, the young man, with his shy eagerness, seemed to 
enjoy his work in the store. She thought a tone of wistful senti¬ 
ment would be appropriate. Some one suggested the possi¬ 
bility of a whimsical analogy between the young student fitting 
shoes in a shoe-store and the young prince fitting a slipper on 
Cinderella. With this, the play approached plot. And because 
it now had a touch of fantasy, it was conceded that it might 
follow its Cinderella’s-slipper motive even if this took it a little 
out of the path that life follows in most shoe-stores. 

Constructing the stage setting. — The playwright was now 
ready to construct a setting for her play, so that she might pro¬ 
ceed to plan it in detail with this background clearly in 
her mind. It was simple enough to build a shoe-store, with 
shelves of boxes, benches, a few footstools and a foot mirror. 
Her setting, however, had to provide a place where the old 
German could see what was going on and, when necessary, 
comment on it and yet where he would not be so conspicuous 
as to distract attention from the young clerk. This problem 
she solved by erecting a balcony at the rear of the stage, where 
the old man, seated at a desk, would letter display cards through 
the greater part of the play. He would sit with his back to the 
store; yet he would hear what was said, and, with shrug and 
gesture and exclamation, he would provide a running com¬ 
mentary on it. Then, too, the store had to give prominence to 
the slipper that was to figure in the play. It would be a silver 
slipper and it would be displayed, brilliantly lighted, in a small 
glass case. This case had to be placed so that it would catch 
and hold the eye and yet so that it would not interfere with the 
vision of the audience and the grouping of characters on the 


200 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


stage. It was decided to raise it on a pedestal in the center of 
the rear of the stage, under the balcony. All this the play¬ 
wright worked out in diagram. If she had had a particularly 
difficult problem of construction, she would have made a little 
model of the stage and would have worked with that. In plan¬ 
ning her setting, too, she was careful not to demand anything 
too elaborate or too expensive for the producer of a one-act play 
to grant. 

Building the plot. — Her plot now shaped itself as the quest 
of the student clerk, urged on by the old German, for a girl to 
invite to his class dance. Hal Crane has not been going to any 
of his class affairs because he doesn’t know any girls. Girls, he 
says, take up a lot of time. If you haven’t been going about 
with them, you can’t, when there’s a dance, just walk up to a 
girl and ask her to go with you. Besides, any girl won’t do. 
Prodded by the questions of the older man, he admits that she 
would have to be pretty, a good dancer, the sort that the fellows 
would like, and — well, nice. The old man insists that she ought 
to have more solid qualifications than these. As they talk about 
the sort of girl one should take to a dance and about the slippers 
that they are arranging in the case, the idea comes, partly to 
the boy, partly to the man, that the choice of a pair of shoes is 
as good a test as any for a dancing partner — or, indeed, even 
for a wife! After all, the man reminds the boy, he knows pretty 
well the girls of the neighborhood who have been coming to the 
shop ever since he has been working there. Why shouldn’t he 
ask one of these girls, the one who shall be designated by her 
judgment and taste in selecting slippers? He’d have her 
character in a nutshell — or a slipper. 

The playwright now asked herself whether she should carry 
on this motive through a sequence of three or four episodes of 
different girls trying on shoes; or whether she should limit the 
girls to two strongly contrasted characters. Would it be con- 


THE ONE-ACT PLAY 


201 


vincing to have only young women enter the store, or should 
the sequence be broken by other customers? If such other 
episodes are introduced, how can they be made to contribute to 
the theme of the play? Dare one delay the entrance of the 
true Cinderella until the end of the play? If she must be 
present early, how can there be suspense? These problems the 
playwright attempted to solve in the following manner. 

While the boy hesitates about the slipper test and the man 
returns to his lettering, Miss Graham enters, a sweet-looking, 
quietly dressed girl. The boy looks at her with a quick new 
interest. But she has come for a pair of round-toed, flat-heeled 
pumps in dull black leather. The store does not carry them. 
Hal tempts her with this pretty slipper and with that, but she 
is inflexible. At last he goes to the case and proudly holds up 
the silver slipper. It is enchanting — she must try it on. Her 
foot looks slim and lovely in it, but she comes back to earth 
with “Goodness, it was never meant to be walked in.” It is 
neither practical nor sensible. Mr. Erden coughs approvingly. 
Miss Graham is sorry; she will have to try somewhere else. 
The boy, disconsolate, says nothing, although Mr. Erden is 
waiting expectantly, his brush halfway to his card. 

Then the old man frowns and settles himself with his back 
squarely to the store, as he sees Miss Elton enter. She is frankly 
but effectively rouged. Her short street dress and her little hat 
are the latest. She wants evening slippers, and, after a short 
skirmish over lesser shoes, he triumphantly brings forth the 
silver slipper. Of course, she’ll take a pair like that! Then, 
while Hal is stumbling over the speeches that should ask her 
to the dance, Mr. Erden, on his balcony, drops rulers, exclaims 
in muttered German, tears up the card he has been working on; 
so that Hal, disconcerted, doesn’t ask her after all. 

At this point, the playwright decided to introduce an episode 
which should not belong to the Cinderella sequence, but which 


202 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


should not destroy the unity of the play because it would con¬ 
firm the idea that character is shown in choice of footwear. 
Mrs. Weber, sensible and unfashionable, enters with her 
daughter Alice, who will wear only what “all the girls” in 
high school are wearing. They wrangle over the question of 
oxfords or pumps, Alice winning the battle. Going out, Alice 
is enraptured by the silver slippers. When she’s a senior—! 
Mrs. Weber insists that nothing is pretty unless it is suitable — 
not even silver slippers. 

Then, to Hal’s astonishment, Miss Graham returns. She has 
found her pair of round-toed, flat-heeled pumps, but she has not 
been able to banish from her mind the silver slippers. She tries 
them on again. In her excitement over them, she is appealing 
and girlish. Hal too is excited. He looks at the gallery where 
Mr. Erden bends an unresponsive back over his work. He 
cannot ask her in the old man’s hearing! He pretends that one 
of the buttons needs fastening. She would wait for the slippers, 
but he will not hear of this. He insists that he will bring them 
right around. She goes. He appeals to Mr. Erden to mind the 
store for a few minutes. The old man is unsympathetic. A 
girl who abandons her sensible ideas for a silver slipper! But 
Hal likes a girl who can have round-toed moments for the 
street and silver-toed moments for the dance. The slippers 
under his arm, he rushes, hatless, for the door. As he reaches it, 
he turns. He bets she can dance! The curtain falls. 

Writing the scenario. — At this point, when setting, charac¬ 
ters, and plot are defined with sufficient distinctness, the play¬ 
wright, with the other members of her group whose plays have 
been coming along with hers, writes a scenario, much as she did 
for her short story, except that she prefaces it, as she will her 
play a little later, with a list of characters in the order of their 
first appearance, with a brief statement of the time and place of 
the play, and with a detailed description of the setting and of 


THE ONE-ACT PLAY 


203 


the characters on the stage as the curtain rises. As any addi¬ 
tional character enters, she inserts a description of her at the 
moment of her entrance. In this way she holds her setting 
and her people before her eyes at every stage of her writing of 
the play. 

Her first page reads: 

A Slipper for Cinderella 1 
Persons of the Play 

Hal Crane, a young law student working in a shoe-store. 

Mr. Erden, an old German, employee in the store. 

Miss Graham, a customer, a very nice girl. 

Miss Elton, another customer, not so nice. 

Mrs. Weber, a sensible mother. 

Alice Weber, her high school daughter, not so sensible. 

Scene: In a shoe-store in Newark, New Jersey. 

Time: On a Saturday morning in spring, about nine o’clock 

We are in a small shoe-store. Rows of boxes line the walls. At the 
center of the rear of the store there is a little glass case displaying under 
brilliant lights a pair of silver slippers, a pair of rhinestone buckles, 
and a pair of silver stockings. On either side of the case, rows of 
benches are set, running to the sides of the store. At the center of the 
left wall, a door forms the street entrance. Across the back of the stage 
extends a balcony. On the balcony, directly over the case, an old man 
is seated at a desk, where, with his back to the store, he paints display 
cards. He sits hunched over his work, and from the rear he looks 
short and stout, grizzled and snuffy. A staircase at the right back 
leads from the balcony to the floor of the store. At the right, in front 
of the benches, are a couple of footstools and a foot mirror. 

The curtain rises upon a store empty of customers. Hal Crane is ar¬ 
ranging the slippers in the display case. He is about twenty, a student 
at an evening law school. It may be his shy smile and his eagerness 
to please that make him popular with the customers in Hackett’s Shoe 
Store. Besides, he is a good-looking fellow, tall and slight, with a 

1 A Slipper for Cinderella, Florence Hass. 


204 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


“ collegiate ” taste in ties and socks. Now he is whistling “Love 
Sends a Little Gift of Roses” as he arranges the case. He interrupts 
his song and calls up to Mr. Erden on the balcony. 

Into her stage picture the playwright has put all necessary 
details — doors that are to be opened, stairs that are to be 
climbed, articles that are to be used. She has avoided terms 
that would remind her of her scene as a stage setting, and not 
as a real shop. She has written concisely, and yet she has not 
tried to be entirely matter-of-fact and impersonal. Her tone 
will help the producer to get the atmosphere of the play. Then, 
too, she must provide for those readers who, as mental pro¬ 
ducers, will enjoy the hint of mood. 

If all members of a group have not been able to keep up with 
those who now have their play in hand sufficiently to write a 
scenario, they may use for this purpose their own short stories, 
if these can have a one-act play sliced from them — right before 
the climax, perhaps, and after the turning-point; or from the 
turning-point through the catastrophe. Or they may adapt 
any short story that can be made to meet the demands of the 
one-act play. 

This scenario will go on from the opening descriptions to a 
brief but concrete and detailed account of all that is said and 
done on the stage. It will note all entrances and exits at the 
moment when they occur. It will insert a description of each 
character at his entrance, as in the play itself. It will not give 
any information that cannot be imparted by acting. 

The scenarios will be criticized by the teacher and brought 
before the class for their comment. Perhaps one asks for action 
that is impossible on a stage, or for a cast that is too large or 
for scenic effects that are too difficult and costly for a one-act 
play. Perhaps another leans heavily on improbable chance or 
coincidence instead of letting the play grow out of character. 
Perhaps here a foundation has not been laid for what is to come 


THE ONE-ACT PLAY 


205 


after; and when it comes, it is with the crash of an unbelievable 
surprise. Perhaps there a situation has been passed over so 
quickly that the audience has not had time to understand its 
implications. For, although the one-act play cannot be too 
deliberate, young playwrights are more likely to make it rush 
on with breathless haste than to delay it unduly. After the 
playwrights have reconstructed the scenarios according to the 
suggestions that they find helpful, they will then be ready to 
use them as guiding plans for plays. 

Dialogue in the play. — The play, developing through action, 
gesture, and speech, will proceed very much as did the short 
story. The playwrights will test theirdialogue by constant com¬ 
parison with everyday speech. Even more than the speech of 
the short story, the speech of the drama must have the accent 
of life because it must submit to the proof of being actually 
spoken. It will have the fragments of sentences and the con¬ 
tractions of verb forms that we noted for our short story. 
Characters will begin to speak, hesitate, break off. No one will 
be permitted a long block of speech without interruption. 
Where a gesture or a movement alone is sufficient, no word will 
be added. 

Stage business. — Words said will be accompanied by stage 
directions indicating tone and gesture. This stage business is as 
important as the speeches. It cannot, as young playwrights 
sometimes suppose, be left to the discretion of the actors. The 
actors may suggest valuable additions or changes, but, after all, 
it is not they who are composing the play. The author must 
work out for them all the detail of expression, tone, attitude, 
gesture, movement; he must write it all into his manuscript. 

The opening of the play. — The opening of the play, like the 
opening of the story, presents a special problem. How shall the 
playwright let his audience know the conditions out of which 
the action of the play grows? The method is much the same 


206 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


as in the short story that opens with a scene: the information 
is conveyed indirectly through speech and action, not too 
obviously designed to serve an ulterior purpose — the en¬ 
lightenment of the audience — but apparently spontaneous. 
Unobtrusively, the first few minutes of the play must make 
clear to its audience the characters and the circumstances. 
And it must at the same time interest — or it may not have an 
audience. How does our “Cinderella” playwright meet these 
requirements with the first moments of her play? 

Hal. Got the sign done yet, Mr. Erden? I need it. 

Mr. Erden. ( Without looking up.) Hm, what you think — I 
work like a steam engine? You’ll get it as soon as it’s dry. 

(Hal whistles on, arranging the shoes first in one position , then in an¬ 
other) 

Mr. Erden. (He rises painfully from his desk and comes down the 
steps in a careful, precise walk to the case.) Here, how’s this? (He 
holds out the card and reads) “Fashion dictates sheer hose and high 
heels.” (He hands the card to Hal with evident pride.) 

Hal. (He takes the sign and looks at it.) I like “Fashion dictates.” 
It gives an air. (He tries to place the sign.) Let’s see. I’ll put it here. 
No, this won’t do. Here! (He stands off and surveys his work. The 
old man does so too) 

Mr. Erden. Na, na, I don’t like it! I’d put the rhinestone 
buckles here (He points) and the silver slippers resting on the silver 
hose to show them off better. Try it! (Hal does) Such a difference! 
(Sententiously) It may seem a small thing to you, but success in life 
comes from small things piled high. You ought to make it your 
business to get the finest effects in shoes and stockings even though 
you’re going to be a lawyer. 

Hal. (He inspects the case) Um. It is better. Thanks. (He 
views the case from a distance.) It’s really a very good-looking display, 
if I must say it myself. (He yawns and stretches) I hope we’re not 
very busy to-day. I’m tired to death. 

Mr. Erden. Tired? (He looks at him sharply) Up again till 
three this morning studying, nicht wahr? 

Hal. (Apologetically.) Only this once. I had to finish my brief. 
(Hal dusts the benches while Mr. Erden leans against the case.) 


THE ONE-ACT PLAY 


207 


Mr. Erden. So, so. This is not what I would have called life 
when I was a boy. Work here from nine in the morning till six at 
night. Go to school from seven to ten. Study, eat, and sleep in be¬ 
tween times. {He shakes his head.) Any one ever tell you not to 
waste time? I guess not! No time to play — no time to go to a 
theatre or a dance, once in a while, eh? 

Hal. {He looks up with interest.) Dance? Our class is running 
one at the Washington next Saturday. I’d rather like to go. 

Mr. Erden. {He looks at him quizzically.) Well? 

Hal. {Hesitatingly.) I guess I’m not going. 

Mr. Erden. {Severely.) And why not, young man? 

Hal. {He tries to carry of his disappointment with his light manner .) 
I haven’t a sister to take, so I guess it’ll be home for me. 

Mr. Erden. {He fairly shouts , in his astonishment.) Sister! 

Hal. Why, yes. I’m sure if I had one, I’d take her. 

Mr. Erden. Ach, you baby! Do you really think young fellows 
take their sisters to a dance? Ask them, and let them laugh at 
you! My, My! Who was the girl you took to the last school 
dance? 

Hal. {Shamefacedly.) I told you I was going, but I didn’t go 
because I didn’t know any girl to ask. Don’t you see? {He stops 
dusting and faces Mr. Erden to defend himself.) I can’t ask a nice 
girl to go to a dance just when I want her to. {Mr. Erden makes an 
impatient movement as if to interrupt , but the boy hurries on.) I haven’t 
time to spend on girls. You know, it takes an awful lot of time! 
And now when I’d give up a Saturday evening, and not study, why 
— there’s no one to ask to go with me. 

Mr. Erden. {He walks up and down in disgust.) My, but you’re 
anxious to go to this dance! When I was a young man, did some one 
have to coax me to find a nice girl to take to a dance? 

As the play goes on. — As the play goes on, any interest it has 
succeeded in arousing must not be permitted to lapse. It must 
be carried forward increasingly through episode after episode. 
In the process of writing, more telling situations may develop 
than those which were planned in the scenario. The scenario, 
then, should be considered not final but tentative, to take ad¬ 
vantage of these more dramatic ideas that come through ab- 


208 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


sorption in the play. And the play, like the short story, will 
end with the catastrophe, or very shortly after it. 

Putting the play on paper. — To get the play on paper in 
correct form, the student may pattern after any volume of 
printed plays. The main object is so to differentiate between 
speech and stage business that the manuscript is easily read. 
The name of the character is placed, sometimes in the center of 
the line above his speech, sometimes at the left of the first line 
of his speech. Stage directions are set off with parentheses and 
are often typed in red. When they are of sufficient length to be 
paragraphed, all lines after the first are indented. Dialogue is 
double-spaced; stage directions are single-spaced. Acting time 
is usually a minute to a page, a twenty to thirty minute play 
thus requiring a twenty to thirty page manuscript. 

Rehearsing and rewriting. — Putting the play on paper ends 
the first stage. Now, if time permits, the play should be read in 
class, the parts being taken each by a different student. If 
class time cannot be spared, groups of students who are inter¬ 
ested in the drama will probably find time out of class to work 
together on their plays. Often a class in spoken English will be 
willing to take one or two such plays as these and present them 
as class exercises. Or a college dramatic association will produce 
a play. While the plays are being read or rehearsed, they will 
be rewritten and rewritten. With the play living before her, 
the playwright will want to bring out character more clearly 
here; to make this bit of dialogue more natural; to provide stage 
business to carry a character over an awkward empty pause. I 
can hear an actress exclaim in irritation, “What am I expected 
to be doing all this time? Remember, I’m still on the stage.” 
A situation may have to be held until every one in the audience 
has had an opportunity to grasp it; preparation may have to be 
made for the entrance of a character, or for an important action. 
It may be necessary to get persons on or off the stage more 


THE ONE-ACT PLAY 


209 

deftly. The comment of the actors and of the audience should 
be heeded. 

Reading and seeing plays. — While students are writing plays, 
they should not only think plays and talk plays, but also read 
plays and see plays. Publications of one-act plays are plentiful. 
To mention only a few of the many, there are volumes of one-act 
plays by Eugene O’Neill, Lady Gregory, James M. Barrie, 
St. John Ervine, Alice Brown, Susan Glaspell, Lewis Beach, 
George Calderon, Bosworth Crocker, George Middleton. There 
are such collections of one-act plays as The 47 Workshop Plays , 
Plays of the Harvard Dramatic Club , Wisconsin Plays. There 
are numerous anthologies of representative contemporary one- 
act plays by one editor or another. It is to be regretted that 
productions of one-act plays are not so numerous; that they are, 
in fact, very rare. It is possible, however, to gain much for the 
one-act play from productions of three-act plays. 

Students of the play should analyze plays to see how their 
own problems of dramatic construction and development are 
met by playwrights of experience. They should come to plays, 
in books or on the stage, with a fresh and open mind. They 
should follow with interest what is new in dramatic writing or 
in stagecraft. They should read reviews of plays in newspapers 
and magazines. 

Plays of folk and fairy lore. — Instead of writing a realistic 
play, some students may have preferred to write a play like the 
second of their stories, a fantasy or a fairy play, a play sym¬ 
bolical, it may be, or allegorical. In this field they will find such 
writers as Maurice Maeterlinck, Lord Dunsany, John Synge. 
They will see what Edna St. Vincent Millay and Alfred Kreym- 
borg have done with the fantastic play. 

Their own play they may build very much as they built their 
story. They may again mingle the familiar and the marvelous, 
as Mr. Stuart Walker does in his delightful “Six Who Pass 


210 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


While the Lentils Boil.” Here a homely kitchen, lentils boiling 
in a copper pot over the fire, and a little boy, watching them 
and waiting for his mother, figure in the same play with butter¬ 
flies that talk, a fugitive queen, a mime, a juggler, and even a 
headsman. 

Their structure. — “Six Who Pass ” suggests, too, the pattern 
on which many fairy plays are built. To the little boy waiting 
on the stage come, one after the other, six characters. With 
them the little boy takes part in a series of episodes, alike in 
unity of purpose but increasing in tenseness of interest and 
suspense. In six steps the action rises to a breathless climax, 
after which it drops suddenly from an eagerly awaited turning- 
point to a triumphant catastrophe. “Three Pills in a Bottle,” 
Rachel Lyman Field’s charming play, builds, as its title indi¬ 
cates, with three. We take three steps up to the climax and 
three steps down to the catastrophe. Nor does the symmetry 
end here. In the rising action, the little boy of the three pills 
in vain coaxes three passers-by — a rich man, a scissors-grinder, 
and a scrubwoman — to stop and play with him. At the boy’s 
request — although they seem doubtful whether they have 
souls — their souls visit him, one after the other, and he gives 
to each soul one of the precious pills that were to have made 
him well and strong. Then, as rich man, scissors-grinder, and 
scrubwoman re-pass his window, the little boy sees with de¬ 
light that his pills have made their souls so strong and happy 
that they now dominate the bodies they inhabit. Even the 
poor soul of the rich man is now able to dictate an act of kindness 
whereby the little boy’s mother may buy more pills. 

Thus we may construct our fantastic plays with episode upon 
episode. Three is a good number for our pattern. Three may 
come to a witch’s cave for charms or philters; three may con¬ 
sult an oracle; three may woo a princess. 

Their source. — The idea for our play may come from another 


THE ONE-ACT PLAY 


211 


play or story. One author lifts the veil from “And they lived 
happily ever after” by writing a play on “Cinderella Married.” 
Others have followed King Cophetua and his beggar maid into 
their domestic life after their marriage. These plays usually 
have a touch of whimsy, as do also such plays of historical 
burlesque as Maurice Baring and Laurence Housman have 
written. 

The following short play grew out of talk in class about the old 
tale of the princess and the pea. It is a little too generously 
supplied with author’s comment disguised as stage direction, 
but the tone of the play permits a little trifling with the severe 
conventions of the drama. 


The Princess 1 

By Ethel M. Feuerlicht 

Dramatis Personae. 

Gareth, the Prince. 

The King. 

The Queen. 

Lais, a Princess. 

Jinny. 

Time: April. 

Place: The King’s kitchen. 

The scene is a low-ceilinged, comfortable room, with a door at the 
left leading to an outer court and a window overlooking it. A 
potted geranium on the window-ledge lends a touch of color to the 
room which, to tell the truth, is only a kitchen, dressed up and 
disguised to hide its real identity. If we have a keen eye, how¬ 
ever, we detect the sink, half out of sight in one corner; next to it 
1 Hunter College Echo. Copyright by Ethel M. Feuerlicht. 


212 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


an ironing-board, beautifully covered with heavy dark purple 
material, to be sure, but still a common board. A curtain of 
the same rich material runs along the wall opposite the window, 
as far as the staircase to the rear, with a great clock at the foot of 
it. To speculate on the common things that may lie hid beneath 
this regal covering would be in decidedly bad taste. We need 
our good manners in this shabby-genteel room, dear friends, for 
it is the living-room of their Majesties, the King and Queen. 

If we look sharp once more, we shall find that we are indeed in the 
very presence of the Royal Family. The King seems to feel very 
much at home. He is in his shirt-sleeves, leaning back in a 
morris-chair. His feet, encased in green carpet slippers, repose 
on a delicate but somewhat worn gold music-stool that bears his 
weight with laudable resignation and faithfulness. 

The King has evidently been reading the fat book beside him — do 
we need to mention that it is Ike Walton's u Compleat Angler ”? 
Now, however, his spectacles are pushed up on his forehead, giv¬ 
ing his kindly jovial face a still more benignant air as he regards 
his wife. The good Queen, attired in a comfortable blue cotton 
housedress, with a dusting cap on her beautiful white hair — 
she always puts aside her crown for afternoon wear and for 
special occasions — has laid down the duster. She looks some¬ 
what worried and anxious, and her glance travels from the 
great clock at the foot of the staircase to the Prince, busily writing 
at a little table near the window; then she looks hastily up the 
stairs and back at her husband again. The dark romantic head 
of the Prince is bent over his work. Even in this position he 
looks tall and slim in his suit of forest green. 

Queen. (She is tying a gingham apron about her ample waist) 

It’s taking her a sight of time to come down, dear. 

King. (4s emphatically as his comfortable position will allow.) 

That proves it! The elite all sleep late. We never breakfasted 


THE ONE-ACT PLAY 


213 

before dinner in the good old days. (He nods reminiscently at 
the ironing-board.) 

Queen. (Too worried to join him in his romantic recollections.) 
Nonsense! She may be an actress, for that matter, instead of a 
princess. They do nothing but sleep, to judge by their looks. 
King. Anything wrong with her looks? 

Queen. Oh, I almost forgot you hadn’t seen her. (Severely) 
Serves you right for staying out so late! With your rheumatism, 
too. (She goes to the shelf over the sink and returns with a big 
black bottle) Here! take your medicine! 

(The King makes a grimace, sits bolt upright, with his eyes 
squeezed tight closed, and gulps down some of the inky fluid from 
a large mixing-spoon. The Queen, somewhat appeased, busies 
herself with setting the table) 

King. Ugh! (Turns to Prince Gareth, who is biting the end 
of his quill-pen and gazing dreamily out of the window) Well, son, 
how’s the sonnet? 

Gareth. (Starting) Oh, I . . . The deuced thing won’t 
rhyme. You see, I was writing it to my (quotes) ‘ Dream Princess 
with eyes of deepest violet.’ 

King. (With evident pride in his son’s poetical achievement) 
What’s the matter with that? 

Gareth. Nothing — nothing — but when she came last 
night I saw her eyes weren’t violet. 

King. Can’t you change the line? 

Gareth. No. I had already made the second line — 

‘Deign to share my coronet.’ 

Her eyes are hazel. Now what rhymes with hazel? Nothing. 
King. Why not change the second line? You know you 
haven’t exactly got a coronet to share. It’s three months since 
we — 

Gareth. Sh! 

(They stop abruptly as the Queen looms in their direction, formid - 


214 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


able, like some calm but ominous battleship. Her intent is 
quite harmless, however; she suspects nothing of the fate of the 
Prince’s coronet. In her hand she holds a tea-kettle with which, 
with all the dignity of a ceremonial, she proceeds to water the 
geranium. The two men watch her anxiously. The Prince 
breathes a sigh of relief as she returns to the table where she 
begins, for the third time, to rearrange the cutlery.) 

Gareth. We’ll have to get that coronet out of hock — it 
wouldn’t do for mother to find out about it. I wish — {Bites his 
pen) 

King. {Feigning an avid interest in order to cheer Gareth. He 
has already had the story from the Queen, of course, but his is a 
kindly soul) What is she like? Do you think she’ll do? How 
did she happen to come here? 

Gareth. {Dreamily) The rain pouring down in torrents — 
a sudden knock at the door — a clear voice demanding admis¬ 
sion. Then she — the Dream Princess. 

King. Is she pretty? 

Gareth. Like a rain-bedraggled flower. Slender, lissome, 
with a lovely throat and fine hands. A trifle too pale, perhaps, 
but imperious, ah, imperious. 

King. {Now genuinely interested, not having had this sort of 
description from the Queen) Your mother told me she was 
bedraggled — drenched to the skin. Like a beggar-girl, she said. 
Gareth. Yet prouder than a Queen. 

King. Has the test been tried, then? 

Gareth. Mother wasn’t sure that she mightn’t be an im¬ 
poster. Real princesses are rare these days. {With the fine scorn 
of youth) Why, her hauteur dimmed our very sceptre. {Points 
to sceptre, lying carelessly on the table) These two years have 
made mother less sensitive to real rank than before. 

King. And still she insists that you marry only a real prin¬ 
cess. Caste sticks longer to a woman than anything else. Why, 


THE ONE-ACT PLAY 215 

I wouldn’t object to your marrying some nice little girl whose 
blood wasn’t strictly blue. 

Gareth. {Seriously) We have to keep up the tradition, you 
know. 

King. Yes, yes, I suppose so. {Somewhat violently) Damn 
tradition! I have to do without tobacco, so that your mother 
can boast of keeping a servant. 

Gareth. It’s pleasant to have Jinny about the house. 
King. Yes — she’s a nice little thing. She’s been getting 
uppish this last week. {The King slaps his knees rather uproari¬ 
ously at the recollection) I heard her tell the ice-man she wasn’t 
“no common servant.” “Lady-help,” she calls herself. Ha! 
Ha! Mother’s exclusiveness seems to be catching! 

{The Queen turns around , startled hy his hearty laughter) 

Queen. I should think you’d be too excited to laugh. 
{Glances at the clock) It’s eleven and she’s not down yet. {A 
sudden fear grips her) Perhaps- 

{The Prince , who has gone hack to his 1 sonnet' and is re-reading it 
with loving appreciation , looks up) 

Gareth. What? 

Queen. {Fearfully) Perhaps she isn’t a real princess! 
King. {Briskly) Nonsense! Of course she is. What makes 
you think she’s not? 

Queen. Why hasn’t she come down? If she’s really a 
princess, as she claims to be, she hasn’t slept a wink all night. 
King. You- 

Queen. Yes. Jinny and I arranged the bed. We used the 
court-linen — I’m so glad we brought it with us. We piled 
seventeen quilts and seven blankets on the bed, all in one big 
soft heap. 

King. {Waggishly, though he has made the joke on other occa¬ 
sions) And the poor little pea beneath all of that? 

Queen. {Impatiently , this time) A dried pea, of course, 


2l6 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


stupid! If she’s a real princess there’s no doubt about her feel¬ 
ing it — it’s hard enough. 

King. {Jubilantly.) Then she’s felt it and your worries are 
settled for life! Hurray! No more scheming, no more scrimp¬ 
ing, no more sacrifices- 

Queen. {With withering contempt.) I suppose you’re think¬ 
ing of your tobacco. Men are so selfish. 

King. Unselfishness and devotion are a little wearing — on 
the rest of the family. 

Queen. {Bridling.) Haven’t I done my best? Haven’t I 
faithfully tested every possible candidate? {What with the 
excitement of the moment and the unkindness of her regal spouse, 
the Queen is not far away from tears) 

King. {Sorry for the havoc he has wrought, pats Queen on the 
hand) Yes, yes, dear. But they were none of them genuine 
princesses. You started with Jinny, you remember. 

Gareth. {Apart, not listening to the conversation, quotes from 
his poem, to get the effect) ‘Ah, her heart is right queenly!’ 

Queen. She said she had never ‘slept so grand’ in her whole 
life. 

King. Wholesome little thing — that’s the way to live: work 
hard, sleep hard, love- 

Queen. {Suddenly throwing up her hands in a gesture of 
dismay) Augustus! How careless we are! It just shows how 
unused we’ve become to court ways. 

King. {Startled by the sudden eruption) My dear, what’s 
the matter? 

Queen. Oh dear, we should have sent her breakfast up to 
her. That’s why she hasn’t been down — she’s waiting for 
breakfast in bed. Oh, oh, I must get it ready. 

{The Queen darts away in a flutter of bewilderment. The King 

looks after her with an indulgent smile) 

Queen. {Looking wildly about) Where’s the tray? 


THE ONE-ACT PLAY 


217 


King. Under the coronets. 

(1 Gareth, waked into consciousness by the last word, looks up from 
his labor of love. He and the King regard each other in con¬ 
sternation as the Queen approaches the purple curtains.) 
Gareth. (.Recovering himself.) I’ll get it for you, mother. 
{He springs up, waves her aside and extracts a silver tray from 
the closet behind the curtains. He looks with relief at his father, 
as the Queen begins to set the tray.) 

Gareth. {In a whisper.) Saved again! We must redeem 
that coronet before she finds out. 

King. {Pessimistic for the first time in his whole jovial life.) 
She’ll discover it before long. Leave it to your mother. 

Queen. {Turning around and speaking all at once in breathless 
haste) Call Jinny. She’s planted enough peas by this time. 
Hurry! Tell her to come in. Oh dear, why didn’t it occur to 
me sooner? Gareth, go now! You two are no more help to 
me than two sticks. Call her! Augustus, cut the bread — 
quick! 

{Gareth rushes out of the door while the King very awkwardly, 
but all the more lovably, bungles with the bread. It is doubtful 
whether he will manage to get four slices out of the loaf — that is, 
if he gets so far — so thick and clumsy are the pieces he cuts. He 
views his work with the same loving satisfaction, however, with 
which his son regarded his own, some ten minutes back. The 
Queen is too busy with frantic futile rushings here and there 
to notice what he is doing to the bread. 

If the garden were a splendid royal affair, and did not correspond 
in size with the cozy little room, we might hear the Prince calling 
“Jinny! Jinny!” It is a modest little garden, however, and 
Jinny, despite the undeniable smallness of her person, has not 
taken long to find. 

She comes in almost immediately, with the small quick movements 
of a bird. She has a basket of shelled peas under one arm — 


2l8 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


her brown head is bare; the sleeves of her gingham dress are 
rolled up to the elbow, showing the strong young arms in all their 
fine vigor. Youth and brimming health have joined forces to 
make her thoroughly good to look at. If one were to select a 
flower for Jinny one would without any hesitation choose the 
pansy, which, you remember, our dear grandmothers called 
“heartsease”) 

Jinny. (Setting the peas on the table, and taking the bread- 
knife out of the King’s hand as she smilingly pushes him away.) 
Come, sir, this isn’t a job for you. 

(Just as the Queen startled him into assisting her, so Jinny charms 
him into settling back in the morris-chair, where he is soon lost 
in the delightful depths of his book. She deftly repairs the 
damage done the bread, places the slices on a plate and hands 
it to the Queen who is returning from the pantry with a glass of 
milk.) 

Queen. Where’s Prince Gareth? 

Jinny. He stayed a bit to pick some flowers for the lady. 
{The Queen gives a satisfied little nod. She puts the finishing 
touches to the tray on which she has been placing the royal 
breakfast — a glass of milk, some fruit, and a dish of raspberry 
jam. It is unfortunate, dear friends, that it is only breakfast. 
It would be an immense satisfaction to discover just precisely 
what a dinner “fit for a king ” would include. We have not the 
faintest idea, although we have spent many an hour in vain 
speculation thereon; perhaps, then, it is just as well that it is only 
breakfast, for it would never do for a dramatist to reveal such 
ignorance .) 

Queen. You may take this now, Jinny. Be sure to knock 
softly. 

{During her speech, a double action occurs on the stage. Gareth 
enters from the garden, two lovely fresh-blooming daffodils in his 
hand. It is evidently his intention to place these on the tray , 


THE ONE-ACT PLAY 


219 


for although the Prince cannot write poetry, he is a poet at 
heart and knows that flowers are food and balm for the soul of 
a true princess. 

Just as he enters, and as Jinny is about to lift up the tray, a door 
at the upper landing of the steps is violently slammed. The 
four people below start back. The King drops his book and 
looks in the direction of the noise. Jinny wheels about, her 
hand at her heart. The Queen sends one wild glance up the 
stairs, jerks off her dusting cap, draws the purple curtains and 
there, in the company of household commonplaces, two diadems 
are seen to repose. She thrusts one hastily, and crookedly, on 
her own head, dashes over to the King and deposits the other 
rakishly over his ear, looks swiftly, with a gesture of puzzled de¬ 
spair, at the Prince, and holds nervously on the table as the 
Princess descends. 

How can we describe the curious yet compelling sight of Lais the 
Princess, as she descends the stairs? To call her a Fury would 
be gross exaggeration, for there is no fire to her wrath; besides 
she still conserves most of her imperious air. One can tell at a 
glance that she is of gentle blood — yet she has none of the 
lovely quality of gentleness. The queenly calm of her being 
has been disturbed and the result is anything but charming. 
There seems to be, too, a distracting note in this whole composi¬ 
tion of outraged queenliness and wilful indignation, but this 
is at first obscured by the great hauteur of her bearing. Halfway 
down the steps she faces the Queen) 

Lais. I never saw such service in my life! 

(The Queen is speechless with surprise.) 

Lais. (Frigidly) I left the palace last evening because the 
entertainment failed to amuse me. I was caught in the rain 
on my way back. I stopped here. 

(The Prince moves forward slightly as though about to speak) 
Lais. (Stamping her foot — we are sure that Jinny, who is 


220 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


gently patting the Queen's arm, could do it much more adorably) 
The way I have been treated disgraces the hospitality of the 
kingdom. You, who make a point of your former royalty! 

(She looks about the room with a scornful glance that misses nothing, 
not even the poor common little ironing-board hidden beneath its 
royal covering) 

You use the purple to hide all these disgusting common 
things beneath. {Points to closet that the Queen, alas, has for¬ 
gotten, in her haste, to close) Who ever heard of a Queen who 
did her own housework! 

{Jinny looks at her suddenly and in the little servant's eyes there 
shines something very fine and splendid) 

Lais. I condescend to spend the night in this place and you 
are so careless of my comfort as to keep me awake the whole 
night by some wretched little obstruction beneath the quilts. 
I can quite believe you have descended to the degradation of 
playing practical jokes, but that you should dare to practise 
them on me is unspeakable! 

{The Princess is white with indignation, but she has lost so much 
of her imperious air that the distracting note has become quite 
clear, even to the King's wholly masculine perceptions. It 
is this: The Princess is attired in a very odd fashion. Her 
gown is hooked in front instead of behind, and she has doubt¬ 
lessly failed to thrust her feet into the corresponding slippers, 
for they present a very awkward and ungracious appearance. 
This, too, undoubtedly accounts for her lack of petulant charm 
when she stamps her foot. Her gloves hang limply from her 
arms and the pearls with which her hair has been caught up 
are twisted tightly about her forehead. Her hair itself looks 
somewhat out of gear, but of course the King cannot be expected 
to know why such is the case. Jinny could tell him that its 
unbeautiful state is due to the fact that the Princess, not versed 
in such matters, has dressed it too high, and that persons of her 


THE ONE-ACT PLAY 


221 


slender height should never, never attempt to wear their hair 
high. The reason for this unbecoming disarray? Hushl Lais 
has resumed her tirade.) 

Lais. Then after a wretched night no one was sent up to 
assist me. If my ladies-in-waiting but knew I was forced to 
dress myself! They would be overcome with horror and indig¬ 
nation! It has taken me three hours to dress! 

(If the Royal Family were not so taken aback by the force of the 
Princess’ wrath, they might see that a smile has just sprung 
to life on Jinny’s face. Whether this is due to the queer costume 
of the Princess or to another more subtle cause, we leave you, 
dear friends, to determine) 

Lais. (.Pointing to the ironing-board.) There is the symbol of 
your poor attempt at royalty. You have the insignia — al¬ 
though I must say that the way you wear your crowns is dis¬ 
gusting— yet beneath the purple you are common, like that 
wooden board. You have lost the imperial air — you are of the 
people, not above them. 

(At this the Prince, who has been gazing at her as one bewitched, 
drops the flowers.) 

Lais. You have done the unpardonable — you have tried to 
popularize the purple, and for this you will never be forgiven — 
not by royalty. (Scornfully.) Maybe the people will claim 
you as their own. You have lost the royal ways. (To King) 

I have no doubt you use your sceptre for driving in nails. 

(The good man is completely overwhelmed by the accusation which, 
for all we know, may be perfectly true) 

Lais. Then remember this — I am the last person of quality 
who has deigned to address you. 

(In spite of the discomfort of her shoes and her train, which trails 
before her instead of following after, Lais sweeps majestically 
from the room. She manages to create a great deal of havoc on 
her way out, however. She upsets the basket of peas which, by 


222 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


one of those strange chances, seems to have been placed there to 
symbolize the Queen’s theory. She steps on the daffodils as she 
brushes by the Prince and disappears through the door. 

From this point on, the play becomes almost entirely pantomimic. 

There is a dead silence in the room, broken at last by the sound of 
paper roughly torn apart. It is Gareth who is throwing the re¬ 
mains of his once beloved verses in the waste-basket. He sinks to 
the chair by the desk in an attitude of hopelessness. 

The Queen, too, has sunk hopelessly on to the sofa. Jinny has 
removed the heavy crown, placing it on the floor, that being handi¬ 
est; and after gently smoothing the Queen’s hair, she busies 
herself with the scattered peas. 

The King, who hates awkward silences, braces himself up — his 
crown also removed — and attempts, with a smile, to relieve the 
tension .) 

King. Thank Heavens they deposed me! 

Jinny. (Looking up.) Oh, sir, you mustn’t talk like that. 

{She rises, giving up the peas as a bad job, goes over to him, dusts 
off his lapels, etc., and makes him feel she’s making him com¬ 
fortable. Then she thrusts her hand into her apron pocket and 
brings out a small package which she drops into the King’s hand) 
King. {Rapturously.) ’Baccy! 

{Jinny nods happily, then hushes him and points to the Queen 
who is looking thoroughly woebegone. He sticks the tobacco into 
his pocket, goes over and sits beside her. After a minute we can 
see that his genial good humor will do much to soothe her wounded 
feelings. 

Meanwhile Jinny has been sweeping the peas into a corner of the 
room. Her eyes light on the daffodils; their freshness has been 
dimmed by royal feet. Jinny sets down the broom, and lifts 
up the flowers with surprising tenderness. She almost mothers 
them — she does in fact, when no one is looking except you and 
me, press her lips to them. Then abruptly she glances at Gareth, 


THE ONE-ACT PLAY 


223 


weighed down by despair. Quickly she walks over and touches 
him on the arm. She holds out the flowers. He looks up for 
a minute, then resumes his despondent attitude. 

Dear Jinny! It is she who is bruised now. She leaves the flowers 
at his side, and covering her face with her arm so that we may 
not see the tears, she goes out of the door. 

Perhaps she walked suddenly into Gareth’s heart with that light 
trembling step. Who are we to explain such a miracle? Why, 
however, does he look up and out through the window as she is 
about to pass by? Listen! He is calling her.) 

Gareth. Jinny! 

(<She stops. The Prince is holding out his arms to her, and in his 
right hand there rests a daffodil. 

Jinny leans forward through the open window, and the light in 
her eyes shines clearer than a hundred diadems. Gareth, dear 
friends, has at last found his real Princess.) 


CHAPTER XX 


IN CONCLUSION 

In the High and Far-Off Times, the Elephant’s Child had 
gone through an arduous experience. His ’satiable curiosity — 
and that means he asked ever so many questions — had led 
him far. He had whispered in the Crocodile’s ear a question 
concerning his secret, and the Crocodile had caught him by 
his little nose and pulled. The Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock 
Snake, who talked as college professors are popularly — but 
ignorantly — supposed to talk, had admonished him, “Rash 
and inexperienced traveller, we will now seriously devote our¬ 
selves to a little high tension, because if we do not, it is my 
impression that yonder self-propelling man-of-war with the 
armour-plated upper deck” (and by this, O Best Beloved, he 
meant the Crocodile), “will permanently vitiate your future 
career.” So they too had pulled — pulled with all their might. 
And now the Elephant’s Child sat on the banks of the great 
grey-green, greasy Limpopo River and sadly regarded his poor 
nose. To him came words of comfort and wisdom from his 
guide and counselor, the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake: 
“Some people do not know what is good for them.” As the 
Elephant’s Child used his painfully elongated nose to hit dead 
a fly that bothered him, “’Vantage number one!” said his 
mentor; as he plucked a bundle of grass and stuffed it into his 
mouth, “’Vantage number two”; and as he slapped cool mud 
over his hot head, “’Vantage number three.” 

Like the Elephant’s Child, members of a class in composition 
travel far during a term’s work, and most of them find it an 

224 


IN CONCLUSION 


225 

arduous experience. It is hoped that their curiosity has been 
insatiable and that they have asked many questions of those 
who have the answers. Most of them have pulled hard. Now, 
at the end of the term, they regard the result. What have they 
to show for hours of application in the classroom and more 
hours of effort at their writing table? Perhaps some of them 
are as dubious concerning the gain as the Elephant’s Child. 

Has their response to the world about them stretched in 
range and power to take in 

The beauty and the wonder and the power, 

The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades, 

Changes, surprises; 

are they more richly aware, now, of “the absolute sight, and 
sound, and smell, and handling of things”? Has the life that 
goes on about them more interest and meaning for them, — 
fathers and mothers and children, friends and familiar speech, 
those who work and those who play? ’Vantage number one! 

From their own limited experience do they turn to books for 
enlargement of that experience and for light upon it? Are they 
more sensitive now to the sincerity and the beauty of a work of 
literature? Do they take pleasure in a novel or a short story 
or a play in proportion as it creates life and as it gives that life 
the structure, the rhythm, the music harsh or tender that 
adequately express it? ’Vantage number two! 

When they write, do they choose such subjects as lie within 
their own personal observation and experience? Do they try 
to say what they have to say clearly, concretely, effectively? 
Are they dissatisfied with whatever they put upon paper lazily 
and sloppily, and are they at peace with themselves only when 
they have not stopped short of the very best that they can do? 
’Vantage number three! 

Once the Elephant’s Child understood the skill and the 


226 


IMAGINATIVE WRITING 


strength of the instrument that had been developed from his 
original organ, he used it immediately, constantly, forcefully. 
No longer could the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake accuse 
him of not knowing what was good for him. There was no 
danger of his suffering his prehensile appurtenance to lapse in 
vigor through want of exercise. To conclude our analogy and 
our discourse together, it is to be hoped that there is no danger 
of the student’s suffering to lapse through want of exercise 
whatever he may have gained of power to experience and to 
communicate. To go through life with senses alert and mind 
interested, to be able to get from books what the writer intended 
one to get, to be equipped to write when the call to write comes 
— it is not too much if one must pay for this with labor and 
with pain. 



\ 

7 



FEB 19 1921 


































































































